Teachers have always struggled with trying to squeeze everything they can teach into the finite number of days in a school year. The school calendar is an outline for teachers and a guideline for them to follow and make sure they fit everything in.

This year, the district is reorganizing the calendar for the 2010-2011 school year. The goal is to allow the staff to function as successfully as possible in the amount of time given.

“We’re taking the time to use all the time we have in the calendar as effectively as we can,” Director of Communications Chris Tennill said.

Days such as teacher preparation days, professional development days, conference days and grading days, are being taken out of the calendar and looked at closely to see how they can be used most efficiently.

“In a way, we’re completely tearing [the calendar] down and building it back up again,” Tennill said. “And it may end up looking the exact same, or it may look drastically different.”

The district hasn’t done a calendar reconstruction of this magnitude for a few years. Although the calendar won’t be finalized until February, there is no guarantee the calendar will be very different.

“We haven’t done a major wholesale rearrangement of the calendar for a while,” Tennill said. “But again, this is no guarantee anything is going to change.”

The biggest challenge the district faces in revising the calendar is the time for teachers to actually teach the students. Staff already spends a lot of time both in and out of the classroom working, and so to take the time given and use it to their best advantage will be a challenge.

“One thing you will always hear from teachers is there is never enough time, because there is not,” Director of Professional Development Administrative Center Lee Ann Lyons said. “When you think about all that they do in a day, there isn’t enough time. And they spend weekends and evenings doing what they need to do.”

Although the committee does have the entire school year to work with, there are many restrictions with the calendar as well. There are state laws on how many school days each district needs, and how many potential snow days, how many potential snow-days there could be.

“The teacher contract is for 192 days, so if they are teaching at the high school, 181 of those days are teacher-student contact days,” Tennill said.

The simple solution to teachers not having enough time to teach is to add more days to the calendar. But, adding more school days also means adding more to the teacher contract.

“There is a financial impact in growing that teacher contract,” Tennill said. “We basically go to school for as long as we can afford.”

The main focus of the new calendar is on the teachers. The administration wants their time teaching to be as effective as possible for the students and efficient for the staff.

“One of our big goals in the calendar is to say there is a finite period of time and how can we use that most effectively,” Lyons said. “And so that is really our main focus.“

The important part in the calendar is to remember there are a limited number of days in a school year. You need to look at the year as a whole and really see how much time there is to work with.

“There is a finite amount of time that we have to get this done,” Tennill said. “So at some point we need to step back and look at what we really need to get done and how much of it we can realistically expect to get done within the time that we have to do it.”