Post last updated at 1:45 p.m. Saturday, March 9:
The Lawrence school district will follow a revised plan for the district’s middle and high school students to make up time lost to snow days, though school board members voiced concerns about how district administrators handled the issue and communicated the plan to families.
The district late Wednesday informed staff of a short-lived plan to eliminate Wednesday early dismissal for middle and high school students for the remainder of the school year to make up instructional time lost to four snow days. The district must meet state minimums in order to keep its accreditation.
Administrators, school board members on the negotiations committee, and members of the teachers union, the Lawrence Education Association, ultimately came to a tentative agreement during a three-hour meeting Friday. The school board discussed the plan Friday afternoon during an urgent meeting that was called a few hours prior.
Here’s the plan:
• Wednesdays will remain early dismissal days for all students, elementary and secondary.
• Middle and high school students will instead attend a full week, Monday through Friday, for the final week of school, May 20-24. (That Wednesday will have early dismissal as usual.) Middle schools will release students at 11:30 a.m. on the last Friday, May 24, and there will be no lunch service that day.
• Middle schools will start five minutes earlier, at 8:10 a.m., every day for the rest of the year.
• Free State High School will add six minutes to the end of each school day for the rest of the year, including on Wednesdays.
Teachers will then be able to return the Tuesday or Wednesday after Memorial Day if they need to clean out their classrooms. They have the option of checking out on Friday, May 24.
Lawrence High School does not need to add six minutes to each day in order to meet the state minimum. Free State has released students 15 minutes earlier on Wednesdays than LHS.
High school seniors will meet their required hours and still have their final exams on May 16 and 17 under the plan.
As the district previously announced, all schools will be in session on Monday, April 15, which was the makeup day built into the calendar.
Members of the board voiced some concerns about the way the plan was handled, as some union representatives and district administrators discussed earlier Friday.
Julie Boyle, spokesperson for the district, told us back in January that the district typically waits to calculate its instructional hours until after the months with extreme weather conditions pass. District administrators would determine if they must add minutes or hours to meet state requirements, and if needed, the school board determines how to make up the time, Boyle said at the time.
However, the plan that was later rescinded was constructed entirely by administrators, and their initial plan to nix early dismissal Wednesdays violated the contract with the teachers union.
Also, many families found out about the plan on Wednesday night when the news was sent out to staff, so the message wasn’t communicated to them directly first, Board Past President Shannon Kimball said.
“Families and community members that are listening — that’s been a large part of the feedback that I’ve received the last couple of days, is that this wasn’t communicated in the way that our parents expected,” Kimball said.
Board member Anne Costello agreed.
“I think it’s been very frustrating because this is exacerbated feelings of lack of trust and transparency with the community which is something we’ve already been struggling with,” Costello said. “And the way that this came out and now having to resend it, send a second email saying ‘Scrap that, here’s the new plan, we didn’t work with LEA and so we had to revise everything’ — I think really damages further damages our reputation within the community.”
Costello said she sees people post online that they shouldn’t put their kids in Lawrence schools and that the school system is horrible.
“That’s incredibly disheartening and I also don’t think it is accurate, but with instances like these happening, that is going to be the impression that gets shared out,” Costello said.
Kristen Ryan, the district’s executive director of human resources, told the board that in hindsight, the administrators wish they had done a lot of things differently. She said she knows now that they should have stopped, regrouped and met with LEA immediately.
“The accreditation word was a bit heightening for all of us here in terms of — in my career as an educator, I’ve never really had to deal with a word of that magnitude at the district level,” Ryan said. “So it felt like the stakes were high on our end, to be honest. But yeah, if we could rewind the last three days we would.”
Becca Craft, student board member, said when the news first came out, a lot of students were scrambling to get their work schedules changed, and things have been really confusing for the past 24 hours. She asked when families would get updated on the new plans, and Superintendent Anthony Lewis said they’d get it Friday night.
Board President Kelly Jones said the way this happened was not in line with interest-based bargaining between the district and the teachers union. She also said that as a district that uses restorative practice, she was hopeful the new plan would help repair harm with families, and she apologized for any confusion the district is causing families and staff.
Part of the reason the district was behind on hours was because parent-teacher conferences, called “Hopes and Dreams” meetings, held before the school year begins did not qualify as time that could count as part of the school term, Ryan said earlier Friday. State statute says that “Time reserved for parent-teacher conferences for discussions on the progress of pupils may be considered part of the school term.”
However, Ryan said the state auditor who determined that the district was short on minutes had questions about how they could discuss student progress before school had started.
Kimball asked some clarifying questions about those conferences and whether they had been flagged before in an audit. This was the third year the district had held the conferences.
“They did not flag it, but I also don’t know if they took (the conferences) out and we were still OK on our minutes because we didn’t have any snow days used last year. So that might have happened and we were just fine,” said Jana Craig-Hare, the district’s director of data and assessment.
Kimball asked about how final exam schedules will work and said she’d encourage principals not to schedule all finals on one day. Jones said she thinks they need time to sort that out, but hopefully this new plan to make up the time will give them more flexibility to come up with a new plan for finals.
Boyle sent notice of the change to school families around 8 p.m. Friday. She also wrote that she wanted to apologize for the way the previous schedule was communicated to families on Thursday and that she appreciated the feedback from students, staff and families.
“I take your feedback to heart and will use it to improve the way in which I communicate future district decisions,” she wrote.
Note: This post previously stated that the school board approved the revised plan to make up time. Boyle said via email Saturday that “The board did not approve the revised plan. It was a discussion item. The board does not approve schedules.”
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Mackenzie Clark (she/her), reporter/founder of The Lawrence Times, can be reached at mclark@lawrencekstimes.com. Read more of her work for the Times here. Check out her staff bio here.
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