Thursday, January 24, 2013
Start times, dismissal times, bus routes and summer vacation. There are lots of factors that go into school schedules, and whenever school systems tinker with them, somebody ends up unhappy.
Several metro Atlanta school systems have been tackling the complicated issue of school schedules recently, treading into a topic that's sure to upset many parents. The Atlanta Public School System recently decided to wait until March to design a calendar that not only meets state requirements and encourages attendance and achievement, but also considers the needs of families. Transportation concerns are one of the main issues facing APS. At a recent Grady High School public forum, attendees were told that changing bus schedules and school start and end times would result in improved student safety, on-time arrival, breakfast participation and ride times for special needs students, as well as avoiding having to add 50 new buses. DeKalb …
Thursday, April 19, 2012
The DeKalb County School System is backing off proposed plans to curtail summer vacation next year after heavily negative polling response.
So, parents – likely many from the North Druid Hills-Briarcliff area – have spoken, and one thing is abundantly clear. Don't mess with our summer vacation. The DeKalb County School System has backed off its plans to spread the summer vacation out across the year more because it irritated plenty of parents who claimed they already planned their vacations. From an Atlanta Journal-Constitution story: The idea, officials say, was to limit students' loss of knowledge over the long summer and to give teachers more development time each week. "I heard clearly from teachers ... that they wanted some time," Superintendent Cheryl Atkinson said Wednesday. She also heard clearly from parents who didn't want to give that time, at least not next year…
Tuesday, August 2, 2011
Public school students in our community head back to school Monday. What happened to Labor Day starts?
Public school students in the North Druid Hills-Briarcliff area head back to school Monday. The date will be Aug. 8. When I was going back to school in the '80s, we went back after Labor Day, which, now, seems excessively late. But over the last 10 years as a journalist covering education, I've noticed more parents getting frustrated over calendar creep. When I was in South Carolina, a group of parents across the state even formed an organization, Save SC Summers, which lobbied to keep school calendars from moving backward beyond mid-August. I don't sense the same frustration here in Georgia but I'm wondering if parents are privately frustrated (or focused on more immediate school system frustrations). What do you guys think about our …
A Decatur Mom
2:08 am on Sunday, January 27, 2013
DF: Your point is? September to June sounds great especially for families who have relatives in the rest of the U.S. which has September to June schedules. It's the so-called "balanced", I call "interruptive", schedule that is not family-friendly. more ›