The state Board of Education voted unanimously Wednesday to approve waivers from 119 school districts to switch from the traditional 178-day academic calendar to an hours-based calendar for the remainder of the school year.
The change was necessary because snow and ice in January forced closure for a full week for most schools in the state, and those days could not be made up without extending the school year.
Under Arkansas LEARNS, public school districts can continue to use “alternative methods of instruction,” or AMI — those big packets of schoolwork or virtual teaching that used to keep kids busy on snow days — for missed days, but the days will not count toward the 178 days or 1,068 hours of on-site, in-person instruction required to partake of funds set aside by LEARNS for teacher salary increases.
The LEARNS Act raised the minimum teacher salary to a minimum of $50,000 per year, but state funding of that mandate came with strings attached.
In response, most districts in the state elected to do away with AMI days. That meant they had to come up with different strategies to make up for the in-person school time.
“This year, as school districts have faced numerous days of inclement weather, those districts that stayed with the 178-day traditional calendar, they were limited in how they could make up those times by day,” Deputy Education Commissioner Stacy Smith told the board.
By law, those districts could only make up time in one-hour block increments, Smith said. By changing to the hourly calendar, the schools could make up the time by the minute.
The vast majority of the schools chose to add minutes at the beginning and ending of the school day from now through the end of the year, rather than extend the date the district closes for the summer holiday.
Arkansas Education Secretary Jacob Oliva said districts should be aware that the days and hours of instruction required by law are minimum standards, not the maximum. He added that sending a big packet home with a first grader does not equal a day of instruction.
“We have to make up instruction,” he said. “If there’s anything that we learned from the pandemic it’s that distance learning and remote learning does not work for all students. In fact, we’ve got national data that says we can lose a generation if we don’t negate these gaps.”
The deadline for requesting the waiver is July 1, so more districts are expected to apply. Of the school districts, 30 had already received approval from their local school boards to switch to the alternate calendar, as required by law, and 89 are awaiting board approval.
Another 139 school districts requested waivers to start the next school year earlier than usual. State law requires school districts to begin school on or after the Monday of the week in which Aug. 19 falls and no earlier than Aug. 14 or later than Aug. 26.
The Bentonville School District, for example, requested to start its start date no earlier than Aug. 12. The district is also switching from a 178-day academic calendar to an alternative hours-based one.
The earlier start date not only allows the districts to end their semester before the winter break but also puts the extra days at the beginning of the school year, instead of playing catch up at the end of the year in case another winter storm or other disaster hits.
The list of school district waivers can be found here.
