School District Sets 2015-16 Calendar
The Glenwood Community School District has locked in its 2015-2016 school calendar.
Classes will begin in Glenwood Monday, Aug. 24. The last day of school will be May 27, 2016.
The school start in Glenwood will be 11 days later than the recently-completed 2014-2015 year. The change, which is impacting districts all over the state, reflects a new state law barring Iowa school districts from starting school earlier than Aug. 23.
To start earlier than Aug. 23, districts would have to gain a state waiver after proving their students would be harmed academically if they didn’t start at the earlier requested date. The law goes on to ask districts to provide data as evidence that students will be negatively impacted in a “significant manner” if classes begin the week of Aug. 23, as set out by state law, according to Iowa Department of Education guidelines. During the 2014-2015 school year, only 14 of Iowa’s 338 school districts started classes after Aug. 23.
The bill was signed into law by Gov. Terry Branstad in April after passing in the house and senate. Branstad had argued in favor of a Sept. 1 state mandate but an “on or after Aug. 23” compromise was reached. The governor has been quoted as saying that early start dates were hurting the state’s tourism industry.
Glenwood Superintendent Devin Embray said the Aug. 24 start date had very little impact on Glenwood’s calendar as the district was already considering Aug. 24 and Aug. 31 as potential start dates in discussions with its Curriculum Coordinating Council. With the move to competency-based learning with standard based grading, the district no longer required the first semester to end before Holiday break leaving state date options open.
“From a teaching and learning perspective, it wasn’t going to impact us negatively with the shift,” he said. “The Aug. 24 date didn’t work out too bad because it still gets the kids out in the month of May.”
Embray added the district’s schedule was also helped by the decision last year to increase the school day by eight minutes district-wide in a move to an “hourly calendar.” The hourly calculation works out to 6.5 hours of daily instruction for 180 school days during the calendar year for grades 1-12 and includes about 30 hours for inclement weather cancellations.
The new school start date law has been criticized for taking control of school calendars out of the individual district’s hands. Embray said he, too, shares the concern of local district’s decisions shifting to more state-centric decision-making.
“There’s more and more influence from the state level into the school system at the local level,” Embray said. “I would say we are losing local control with local boards deciding what is best for their patrons. They don’t have the ability to decide that anymore and there are really very few things we do have local control of any more. It’s definitely a concern whenever local control is taken away.”
Embray was actually surprised by the calendar becoming an issue with the contentious debate he’s heard around the state. He’s more than a little concerned it may have distracted from the more pressing question of educational financing.
“It makes you wonder if this was a real issue or if this was an issue clouding some bigger issues dealing with the finances,” he said. For several months, the House and Senate had been entrenched in a debate over allowable growth – the figure the state uses to set supplemental aid to districts – before reaching a compromise last week.
After extending the legislative session past its scheduled May 1 recess date, the House and Senate have tentatively agreed to a 1.25 increase in allowable growth plus a one-time $55 million appropriation for schools. The deal announced last Monday is the equivalent of the 2.625 percent increase sought by senate Democrats in March as a compromise with house Republicans. Democrats had originally requested a 6-percent and then a 4-percent increase.
The one caveat insisted on by Republicans in the current deal was that $50.2 million – or 1.25 percent of the allowable growth – of that increase go into the school funding budget for next year.
Embray summed up the complex deal as the legislature wanting to give money but not wanting to effect the base of the per pupil costs and any future state supplemental funding percentages.
“They don’t want to have that base affected for next year so they gave one time money,” Embray said. “It isn’t included in the base per pupil costs and goes into your (school districts) unspent balance and can then be used for student costs. But it won’t figure in the percentage increase. The difference is next year, anything they (the legislature) decides, percentage wise, won’t be based on the one-time money, it’ll be based on the percentage of district costs.”
Had a compromise not been hatched, school allowable growth rates would have been set at “zero” meaning all districts would have had to operate under the previous year’s allotment or what is referred to as the “budget guarantee.” Districts would have then likely had to raise property taxes to cover the shortfall.
With the debate over funding carrying on past its own budget deadline, Glenwood allotted for a “safe” rate of 1.25 percent for the upcoming fiscal year in its own budget.
Embray feels Glenwood’s budget is in a safe place for this upcoming year but with a compromise not yet reached for the following fiscal year, trouble could be looming again for education budgets and another drawn out legislative battle. The 2016-2017 allowable growth rate, which was also supposed to be decided in the current legislative session, is still being debated with no clear compromise in sight. Meaning, Embray said, the legislature and school districts could be right back in this position again next year.
“It looks like we’re tentative for this year, and if it goes through we won’t be in the budget guarantee,” Embray said of Glenwood’s budget. “But 2017 is an unknown factor. It appears they’re (the legislature) going to go to loggerheads on that one. I think the Governor even tried to get them to figure 2017 out, but I don’t think they’ve made any progress at all.”