School Daze

It’s not enough that our government wants to mess with the school system, imposing a complicated set of calculations that don’t really seem to help all that much. North Carolina also wants to get into the act, by making sure that school doesn’t start prior to a particular date and doesn’t run past a particular date. Couple that with the fact that North Carolina schools must apparently operate for a minimum of 180 days, it’s going to make for quite a challenge.

Most months seem to have around 22 available days (week days) for education. The new start and end requirements allow for a maximum of 13 days in August and June. Using those numbers, we’re talking about 211 days that may be possible over that calendar. Consider that there are 22 holidays on the CMS calendar this year. That’s 189 days. There are 10 additional teacher workdays on that calendar. That’s 179 days, and makes no consideration for days the school may unexpectedly not operate (ie, snow days). We’ve had at least a couple of those for the last two years. Also consider that except in very rare occasions, February will never have 22 possible school days, so the starting number is likely to be even lower. Using the actual months for a 2004-2005 school year, you’d start with 208 days. Uh-oh.

In fact, the last two years have seen problems with snow days and the school schedule that require a slight addition of extra days – extra hours through the last couple months, Saturday school, even extending the school year by a day. And that’s with a calendar that starts in the middle of August. It continues to amaze me that our government thinks that they can legislate everything and have it magically work itself out. Just because it’s on the books doesn’t mean that the real calendar has to comply.