The Dell Rapids School Board approved the 2015-2016 school calendar during their regular meeting on Monday, February 9th. Superintendent Dr. Summer Schultz presented the recommended calendar to the board for discussion.
She said, “As you know, I work with the Superintendent’s Cabinet. We have mixture of high school, middle school, elementary…very aware that for high school folks there’s still some growing pains getting used to not having the semester end at Christmas break time. However, the cabinet by the end of weighing the pros and cons of everything, this is the agreement that we came up with to recommend.”
Schultz and the cabinet held discussions with Mt. Marty to make sure the students enrolled in the online dual credit classes that are in collaboration with Mt. Marty would be able to still participate in the program with the school calendar ending the first semester on January 15th.
“We have been able to give the okay to extend our semester a little bit differently so that those students will still be able to participate. Because that is one aspect that I don’t think if you don’t have a high school kid, you don’t understand that part of it. That’s a big chunk of kids that we were worried about. We’re able to be comfortable now knowing that they (Mt. Marty) will work with us even with having our semester end on the 15th,” Schultz mentioned.
Schultz also told the board that the high school finds it very important to have semester one and semester two even with each other. However, with block scheduling, to have the first semester end by Christmas time, the school year would have had to start around August 20th, and then have no breaks.
“You’ll find some schools are starting a bit later this year, but they’re still getting out at Christmas time with semester one. With a block schedule that doesn’t work if you say have kids competing for scholarships and things and you have five less days in semester one, which actually is 10 less days in a block schedule. So that was kind of a non-negotiable our high school staff told me. Therefore, in order to get semester one done by Christmas break, we needed to start by about the 20th, and then there were no breaks. There was no Wednesday before Thanksgiving, there was a short Christmas break, there was no day after conference, which are things that the staff really did like, hence we decided on still not ending semester one at Christmas time,” Schultz explained.
The 2015-2016 school year will begin on Wednesday, August 26th, and will end on Wednesday, May 25th. Graduation is scheduled for Saturday, May 21st. The school calendar also features a spring break at the end of April.
Schultz said that there are 173 student-contact days and 178 staff days, and the semesters are as even as they possibly could be. The board approved the new calendar unanimously.
