West Virginia state law says this about how many days students should be in school each year: “Within reasonable guidelines, the school calendar should be designed at least to guarantee that one hundred eighty actual days of instruction are possible.”
The key word here is “possible.”
It’s also “possible” when football season begins that each high school team has a shot at going undefeated. As the season wears on, the possible gives way to reality.
In much the same way, as the school year progresses the possibility that children will actually be in class for 180 days fades away.
So, how many of the 55 county school systems do you think actually provided 180 instructional days last school year? 50? 45? 35?
According to the state Department of Education exactly four counties (Boone, Kanawha, Lincoln and Putnam) hit the 180 mark. The other 51 counties were anywhere from one to nine days short. The state average was 176.3 days.
And last school year was not an aberration, it was the norm.
During the 2006-2007 school year, 39 of the 55 counties filed reports on instructional days and of those 39, just 12 met the mark. The rest missed anywhere from one to 12 days.
The weather is a factor. Snow and ice are significant problems for county school systems—especially those in more mountainous areas. And this past year some counties that rescheduled instructional days on June 4 and 5 had to cancel them because of heavy rains.
But a more consequential impediment to reaching the instructional goal is the school calendar. By state law the public school year cannot begin until Aug. 26th and must end by June 8th.
Yes, county school systems can find 180 days in that window--at least for planning purposes—but plans start to crumble when the calendar has to take into account spring break, deer season, staff development days, the weather and more.
Teachers and education officials typically tell me they can adjust their classes to make up missed work and that the emphasis should be on quality of learning and not quantity.
Well, that may be so, but if the number of instructional days isn’t that important why is it even written in the law?
I strongly suspect that the number of days students and their teachers are together in the classroom does make a difference.
Yet we cling to the antiquated concept of a traditional school calendar that goes back to the days when kids needed the summer off to help with the family farm.
Former West Virginia Governor Bob Wise, who is now president of the Alliance for Excellent Education, writes in his book Raising the Grade, “The system that was designed for an earlier era has broken down under the strains of trying to meet the demands of an increasingly competitive society and rapidly changing global economy.”
The public school year typically begins with great optimism. Bright-eyed students are encouraged by their teachers to believe all their goals are within reach, that all dreams are possible.
Unfortunately, in most counties an antiquated and ill-conceived school calendar essentially guarantees that the promise of 180 instructional days is one that won’t be kept.
