OSPI requires an average of 1027 hours of instruction for each school year in a 180-day calendar. OSPI provides a waiver option to address learning needs and allow for flexibility of their programs. School districts are permitted to waive up to five school days in a given calendar year as long as they meet the 1027 instructional hour requirement. Waivers are good for three years. Meridian School District has been working to build specific instructional skills and content knowledge to increase student achievement and close opportunity gaps – two significant strategic plan goals. Our waiver proposal invests three days to provide additional training and professional development to teachers and support staff across the district. We will continue to exceed the required 1027 instructional hours.

Yes, we have used four non-student workdays to prepare the day before school starts, a workday between semesters for grading, and one additional workday in each semester. OSPI requires districts to dedicate content for two of these four days: one to examine social-emotional learning and the other to examine racial equity. While we have had those days, and they will continue, there are OSPI requirements for specific content. This has limited our ability to create cohesively shared professional development for our teachers and support staff to better meet our strategic plan goals of increased student achievement and closing opportunity gaps through improved instructional skills. In this calendar, we moved the two workdays from each semester to the beginning of the year and have placed the waiver days in October, March and May to build our professional development targeted at improving instructional practices throughout the year.
Teachers and staff will be engaged in professional development and training to increase their understanding of inclusive practices as it applies to instruction, connecting mental health training and social-emotional learning strategies to increase achievement and provide opportunities for all students. Paraeducators will be working toward their certification goals and building their social-emotional learning strategies and building their student support skills. Given the impact of the pandemic, we recognize our students need additional support now and into the foreseeable future. This positions our district to collaborate and effectively recognize and target interventions for each student using specific assessment information. Each waiver day builds on these skills and strategies.

Another exciting aspect of this calendar is the movement of conferences to the beginning of each semester. The focus is on prioritizing social-emotional aspects and building strong relationships with families early on in each semester. It is a different focus on students’ needs, their recent struggles, and their goals. This approach will allow us to prioritize each child by putting them at the center of the conversations, honor family input, and support students in developing goals for each semester. Having conferences early in the second semester allows us to use first semester performance and grades to help reinforce stated goals or develop new goals earlier in the semester.

This dedication of elementary conferences one week and secondary conferences the next allows us to focus these supports on each level – each week. We hope the separation minimizes conflicts families have reported when we held elementary and secondary conferences during the same week in the past. This also allows us to better support our transportation routes and not overwhelm our translator/interpreter resources. This spring we were unable to provide these supports to all of our families and their children as effectively as we needed during our conferences.

Remote learning will be how we intended to respond to inclement weather situations. Deploying one-to-one devices to all students allows us to shift to remote learning if we have the need. We expect to increase our use of Google Classroom and will have teachers prepare remote learning steps for times we may run into inclement weather. We will be sure to communicate early whether we anticipate a shift to remote learning. This permits us to not need to pad the calendar with additional reserve snow days that have pushed our end of the school year deeper into June.

Update 2021: As we entered May 2021, OSPI and the State Board of Education have signaled they may not permit districts to allow pivoting to remote learning as a way to address snow days. This has not been fully determined. After consulting our calendar committee, the decision was to add any snow days to the end of the calendar. We will be sure to share out what our plan will be when we hear definitively about our ability to use remote learning to address snow days.

No. Waiver programs run for three years. We also developed similar draft calendars for 2022-23 and 2023-24 for the waiver application. We will share them as drafts after we hear the waiver was approved. Waivers may be renewed through OSPI. We will assess the effectiveness of this waiver plan by the winter of the third year so a decision may be made earlier in the year whether we should renew the waiver.

It would be unfortunate and hamper our ability to collectively expand our instructional, assessment, and social-emotional skills of our teachers and support staff. We would need to adjust the calendar in response.

In developing our plans for our most recent return to in-person learning in April and applying for the waiver, we discovered the daily schedule for Irene Reither is five minutes less than the instructional hours of MMS and MHS. Since we were re-establishing the board-approved schedule from 2020 for Irene Reither Elementary to finish this school year, we elected to wait until the next school year to bring all teacher instructional hours into alignment with each other.