Poudre School District finalizes its calendar for the 2024-25 school year
Poudre School District’s calendar for 2024-25 will look much like it does this school year, with classes beginning Aug. 14 and ending May 29.
Aug. 14 will be a transition day for students entering sixth and ninth grades. Most students will start school Aug. 15. The two-week holiday break will run from Dec. 23 through Jan. 3, with fall and spring breaks of five days apiece scheduled for Nov. 25-29 and March 17-21, respectively.
The calendar was unanimously approved Tuesday night by the Poudre School District Board of Education at a special meeting prior to its regularly scheduled work session.
The district’s three new board members — Conor Duffy, Kevin Havelda and Scott Schoenbauer, who were elected earlier this month — officially took their oaths of office during the special session, as did incumbent Jessica Zamora, who was reelected to a new four-year term.
A committee consisting of parents, guardians and PSD staff members had provided five possible calendar options to the school board at its last meeting Nov. 14, but the selected calendar was really the only viable choice, board members said in discussion following that presentation.
Starting the school year later after Labor Day, as a calendar committee survey found a majority of parents and staff favored, would require pushing the end of the first semester into January — after the two-week holiday break. That option would prevent the district from offering its increasingly popular concurrent enrollment courses with Front Range and Aims community colleges, as well as Metro State University of Denver, which all complete their fall terms before the holidays. This fall, about 3,200 of PSD’s 9,000-plus high school students are participating in concurrent enrollment programs that allow them to earn college credits, board members were told.
More: School choice: What you need to know about options within Poudre School District
Students, particularly at the high school level, were overwhelmingly opposed to any changes that would extend the first semester past the holiday break or extend the school year into June.
Concerns were also raised, primarily by outgoing and term-limited board president Rob Petterson, about the impacts changing the calendar would have on national testing dates for Advanced Placement International Baccalaureate testing as well as Colorado Measure of Academic Success test dates.
Another option many calendar committee members favored, co-chairs Alicia Bono and Melanie Mierzwa told the school board, was to have elementary and middle-school students start four days later in August than high-school students. That option is not available, though, under terms of the district’s contracts with the Poudre Education Association and administrative and classified employees’ associations that were approved last May. Those contracts require 175 student-contact days at the elementary school level and 176 at the secondary level (middle and high schools).
The Colorado Department of Education requires a minimum of 160 student days and 1,080 hours of instruction during the school year, and the state’s School Finance Act requires a minimum of 360 hours of instruction in the first semester. So, the district would have some flexibility there to consider a later fall starting date.
School board members suggested the district work with the impacted employee associations to see if they could move to a calendar with later fall start dates for elementary and middle schools than high schools in future years. Doing so, they said, would also require extending the district’s contract with its outside vendor, AlphaBEST, to provide additional days of its summer child care program for elementary and middle school students.
Nearly 7,200 parents, guardians, staff and students responded to the calendar committee’s fall survey. The top priorities expressed by respondents in all groups, Bono and Mierzwa said, were starting the school year after Labor Day and providing two full weeks of winter break and five days of fall break. The only option presented to the school board incorporating all three of those objectives would have extended the first semester to Jan. 31 and the last day of school to June 18.
New school board members take their seats
Duffy, Havelda, Schoenbauer and Zamora all took their oaths of office during the special meeting, where Kristen Draper was elected the school board’s new president and Zamora the vice president. Zamora was reelected Nov. 7 to represent District G, while Schoenbauer is replacing DJ Anderson in District A, Havelda is replacing term-limited Nate Donovan in District B and Duffy is replacing Petterson in District F.
Draper, who represents District C; District D director Jim Brokish; and District E director Carolyn Reed were not up for reelection in this cycle and remain on the seven-member board.
Reporter Kelly Lyell covers education, breaking news, some sports and other topics of interest for the Coloradoan. Contact him at kellylyell@coloradoan.com, twitter.com/KellyLyell or facebook.com/KellyLyell.news.
This article originally appeared on Fort Collins Coloradoan: Poudre School District finalizes calendar for 2024-25 school year
