New Bloomfield continues 4 day school week

The New Bloomfield Board of Education met Thursday evening.
The New Bloomfield Board of Education met Thursday evening.

The New Bloomfield R-3 School District will continue with the four-day school week next year.

The Board of Education discussed the issue in detail Thursday evening during its December board meeting, voting to approve a 2021-2022 calendar. The discussion began with a call from board member Tod Schattgen to postpone the calendar discussion until January.

"My underlying concern is that the board hasn't had enough time as a group to discuss the pros and cons of the calendar," Schattgen said.

Ahead of the meeting, board member Josh Woods solicited community responses on the school week. He said that about 40 people reached out to him and that a majority were against continuing with a four-day week next year.

"For 100 years we went for five days a week," Woods said. "And then for one year, we do the four-day. And I just say people are upset. A lot of people don't like it. We need to gather this information and we need to hear from the citizens."

Board member Gina Clark said that she reached out to some of her contacts as well, but got different responses.

"I have a couple of contacts that were struggling against it (the four-day week) last year and after communicating with them, they're like, 'It is what it is. It's great. It's worked out. I was definitely a nay-sayer, I support it now'," Clark said.

Board President Terri Sweeten said that some of the positive messages sent to Woods were also sent to her.

"I know I was included on some of these emails - I wasn't included on any of them against, so I don't know where those came from," Sweeten said. "I wish that information would have been provided to the board."

Schattgen, Woods and board member Angie Robinson-Sullivan supported Schattgen's request for another month to consider the issue, but his motion was defeated, with Sweeten, Clark, board member Amy Pendleton and board member Stacy Allen voting to make a decision Thursday evening.

Sweeten noted that preparing for a new school year takes a lot of planning and that putting off a decision could make that process harder on staff.

"It doesn't seem like it's a big deal to change the calendar - it is a huge deal to change the calendar from a four to a five or a five to a four," Sweeten said.

The calendar presented to the board included four-day school weeks, with the exception of the first week of school. It was made by a committee with representatives from both district schools.

Classes begin Aug. 23. After that week, the only other Mondays with school in session are Nov. 24 ahead of Thanksgiving break and April 11 ahead of spring break.

Throughout the year, sixteen Monday Academy remediation opportunities will be held. During nine Mondays, staff will have professional development. The remaining eight Mondays, as well as Labor Day, Martin Luther King Day and Presidents' Day holidays, will be off days for students and teachers.

School holidays would include Nov. 24-26 for Thanksgiving, Dec. 20-Dec. 31 for winter break and April 14 and 15 for spring break. The last day of school for students and graduation will fall on May 27.

Superintendent Sarah Wisdom said that the school would keep snow days. Unless the district knows bad weather is coming ahead of time, it would be too difficult to pivot to virtual learning quickly, she explained.

All of this was up for discussion Thursday night, but much of the discussion focused on the merits of the four-day school week as the board prepared to make a decision.

Schattgen said he has received negative comments from citizens, but that the feedback he heard from staff was positive.

"I don't want to not give you credit for the hard work you've done and the hard work you're doing to improve the students' education," Schattgen said. "It's commendable. It's great work. I just don't see the citizens that elected me to be on the board supporting it."Helen let me know if this quote is too confusing

Sweeten said that some of the positive emails sent to her and Woods were from teachers who said they came to the New Bloomfield school district because of the four-day week.

Robinson-Sullivan said that her views on the issue have changed since it was first introduced.

"I was certainly an opponent to the four-day school week last year," Robinson-Sullivan said. "When it was brought up to the board at that time, I was not in favor of it all because of what I felt like it was going to do to lots of families when it came to where kids are going to go on Mondays."

She said her concerns about childcare were resolved.

"There were several folks that came up last year -I thought they were crazy - they said it will work itself out," Robinson-Sullivan said. "It has for us."

Clark said that parents told her that many kids are more excited to go back to school on Tuesday.

"They feel a little bit more refreshed, they have that little spring in their step to go to school instead of that drag them out of bed by their hair sort of Monday morning," Clark said.

A common refrain during the meeting was that the pandemic has made it difficult to evaluate the four-day week with hard data.

There isn't good data from last year, because of how the pandemic interrupted the semester and testing. This year, the pandemic has continued to rage on, with periods of distance learning and individual students in quarantine.

"I wish we weren't doing the first year this year because you can't compare this year's academic data to last year's academic data, number one because everyone got out in March," New Bloomfield Elementary School principal Jennifer Fletcher said.

But staff and administrators could point to their own perceptions of the year.

One positive mentioned multiple times was Monday Academy, where students in need of extra help come in on certain Mondays for remediation.

The district is collecting data on Monday Academy and will present more on the subject during the January board meeting. Wisdom did say that middle school students who attended Monday Academy this fall saw an average of 1.6 years growth in reading.

"I had no clue what Monday Academy was going to be like, but it has been great for these 37 (elementary) kids," Fletcher said of her students.

New Bloomfield High School and Middle School principal Paul Cloudwright said that he did not believe academics have suffered with the four-week.

He gave the example of one teacher who is not only further along with her curriculum, but has had the chance to add enrichment exercises. He also said that the four-day week helped with teacher morale during the pandemic.

"We are so much in a better position than other schools around the state morale-wise," Cloudwright said. "Now, that's a COVID concern, but the big thing is that morale boost doesn't just have manifestations in smiles. It has manifestations in being able to get further along in your curriculum and to be able to get deeper."

Fletcher is in her first year in the district. Previously, she worked in Harrisburg, which was one of the earliest adopters of the four-day week in the state.

"At first the community was like, 'You've got to be kidding me,'" Fletcher said. "But by the end of that first year, the community did not want to go back to a five-day week."

Fletcher said that the four-day week makes teachers more aware of their teaching.

"You cannot fly by the seat of your pants," she said. "You cannot think, 'Oh, we'll get to it on Friday.' You have to be very aware of your curriculum and where you need to be."

Eventually, when a vote was called to approve or reject the presented calendar, a majority voted to approve it with the four-day week - Sweeten, Allen, Robinson-Sullivan, Woods, Clark and Pendleton voted for and only Schattgen and Woods voted against.

A second article planned for Sunday, Dec. 20, will include other board discussions and decisions from Thursday's meeting.