Parents, teachers, students, and Central Kitsap civilians voted on starting school before Labor Day for the next three years. Roughly 1,700 people responded to the vote saying they either want school to start before Labor Day or after. The Central Kitsap School Board President Eric Greene and Vice President Meghan Hein made it clear that there will be an early start to next school year.
“By moving [the school start day] up a couple days, it also means that our end date moves up a couple days,” Hein said.
With the district deciding to start and end the school year earlier, most parents appreciate having the extra holiday. This small break gives the parents and students the opportunity to figure out what this school year is going to look like.
“There are some really great changes that have been made here,” Hein said. “I personally, as a parent, did appreciate when we were starting [school] before Labor Day, because it was a little bit of an easier re-entry for my kids when they would go to school …you would have a couple days and then a built-in holiday.”
When school starts before Labor Day, there will be the first week of school, and soon after, there will be a non-school day because of the holiday weekend. Other parents are concerned about the change, as they believe the holiday is more of a disturbance toward the school’s schedule.
“It’s about having the school year get off to a seamless, free flowing start,” AP English Language and Composition teacher and parent Kevin McCarthy said. “It sounds to me [that] by going [to school] before Labor Day, we’ll have an interruption with Labor day. Because usually we started afterwards. We don’t have that holiday, so maybe starting the week before, we’ll go and then we’ll have a holiday that will be kind of a quick interruption to the school year.”
Starting the school year before labor day could most likely cause interference with students’ education and lesson plans of teachers. The Board made the decision to move the snow days elsewhere for more quality time with family and friends.
“You know, how we always have the day that might be a day off if we don’t need to make it up for snow?” Hein said. “They’ve moved that away from holiday weekends. So recently it’s been, maybe, the Friday before President’s Day or something like that. So they’ve moved some of those built in snow days away from that, to preserve those three day, four day weekends for family vacations.”
The breaks can give the students and staff a pleasant quality time with their families and friends. There were two separate surveys that were sent out, one survey went to teachers and the other went to students, parents, guardians, and civilians in the Central Kitsap School District. These individuals filled out the survey around winter and spring time to see what they wanted to see in the calendar for the next three years.
“Just within this last school year, there was a survey that went out somewhere around February or March, and they had roughly 1,700 people to respond to that,” Hein said. “That would have been students, staff, and parents or family members that responded to that [survey]. And then later in the school year, there was another survey that went out to staff, and so it was the collection of those two surveys. Both those two surveys largely shaped the direction for the change in the calendar for the next three years.”
For the next three years, there will be a significant change in the school year calendar. Starting school before Labor Day is critical news for some students and families in the CKSD. Despite the calendar being put in place, the school board can always change it if needed.
“And so yes, we’re starting earlier, but we’re also getting out earlier,” Hein said. “So I think that there will possibly be students that are pretty, pretty excited about that part as well.”
