Photo by Ashleigh HenegarPrince William County Schools staff presented the proposed 2016-2017 calendar to the School Board Dec. 2.
As PWCS continues to qualify for a pre‐Labor Day opening next year, the Board heard options for opening school before and after Labor Day 2016.
If school begins Monday, Aug. 29, 2016, school will once again close three days for Thanksgiving holiday, but not include a full two weeks for winter break. Schools would close from Thursday, Dec. 22 to Jan.2, 2017. School would reopen, Tuesday, Jan. 3.
Furthermore, under this plan, spring break for students would be from April 10‐17 (April 7 would be a teacher workday) and the last day of the year for students would be June 15.
The draft of the pre-Labor Day calendar is located here.
If the school year would begin for students after Labor Day on Sept. 6, 2016, the Thanksgiving and winter breaks would be the same as the pre-Labor day calendar, but the school year wouldn't end for students until June 22.
The post-Labor day calendar draft is located here.
Both plans would earmark Oct. 10 as a divisionwide professional learning day and close schools for students and teachers on Election Day, Nov. 8.
These calendars would also give schools at all levels 181 days, which is would be the first time that all levels have the same number of days.
According Director, Office of Accountability Dr. Jennifer Coyne Cassata, the calendar committee made it a priority to end school as early as possible in June and keep Monday after Spring Break as a holiday.
She said that 76 percent of the committee strongly recommends the pre‐Labor Day opening option. The committee received feedback about the calendar from 6973 parents through an online survey in November. 56 percent of participates favored a pre-Labor day opening.
Gainesville District representative Alyson Satterwhite asked Cassata for a rationale as to why winter break wasn't a full two weeks.
"With Christmas and New Year's falling on Sunday, the New Year's federal holiday is a Monday," Cassata said. "If you do two weeks, you do two weeks plus a day. The decision was because there would be plenty of time for travel if the last day of school was [Dec. 21] before the Christmas holiday and you would have through [Jan. 2]; you would almost have two full weeks."
She admitted that the 2016 presidential election also posed a challenge to developing the calendar.
"If you add more days off, you have to put them somewhere," Cassata said. "That would mean extending the school year or trading off some of the other."
The extra 10-minutes that were added to the instructional day in the 2013-2014 school year will remain for the 2016-2017 school year, which Cassata said gives the School Division the equivalent of 13 potential days to accommodate weather-related closings. Without those additional minutes there would only be 8 days available.
The Board will vote on one of the two options at the Dec. 16 meeting.
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