By Tom Marshall, Times Staff Writer
Tuesday, September 7, 2010
TAMPA — The Hillsborough County School Board has moved the last day of school and decreased the number of controverial early-release days in its school calendar for the current year.
By a unanimous vote Tuesday, the board adopted a revised calendar that makes the last school day a Friday, June 10, rather than a Monday.
It was only last week that the board adopted teacher contracts that included 14 early-release days this year, as well as early dismissal on the final day of school.
But board members said they didn't realize they had also voted to move the final student day to a Monday next June, when they said absenteeism might run high. And some members said parents were right to object to the large number of early-release days, particularly one that was scheduled for the last week of school.
In a memo issued this afternoon, superintendent MaryEllen Elia recommended scheduling regular classes for both May 25 and June 8, which had previously been designated early-release days. Those changes, which come "by agreement with the Hillsborough Classroom Teachers' Association" union, have the effect of returning the last day of school to Friday, June 10, where it had been until last week.
Teachers would work the same number of days as they previously agreed in voting to ratify the contracts. But Feb. 11 and March 7 — still student holidays for the Florida State Fair in western Hillsborough and Strawberry Festival in the eastern Hillsborough, respectively — would become teacher planning days.
Teachers and administrators have said the early-release days are sorely needed for planning, collaboration with colleagues and keeping up with new responsibilities under the district's seven-year reform effort with the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation.
But parent Jamie Blumenthal, who has called them a disruption for families and classrooms, said the changes were a step in the right direction.
"It's a start," she said. "We've always wanted to get rid of them, but we understood there needed to be a comprise."
Blumenthal said a Facebook page she started with her husband to rally parents now counts more than 1,600 members.
"I started it out of frustration, because no one was listening," she said. "I feel we have made so much headway with it. Change is coming."
The board will consider the changes at its 3 p.m. meeting today at 901 East Kennedy Blvd. in Tampa.
For more details on this developing story, return to tampabay.com or read tomorrow's St. Petersburg Times.
Tom Marshall can be reached at tmarshall@sptimes.com or (813) 226-3400.