The Clear Lake Community School Board of Education conducted a public hearing for proposed changes to the 2024-25 school calendar on Tuesday, Feb. 13. With no dissenting votes the Board unanimously approved the changes.
School will still begin on Aug. 23, the first day they can legally start, and the last day for students will be May 28. Five more full professional development days will also be added throughout the year.
Clear Lake school superintendent Doug Gee said the main shift in the calendar is the addition of those professional development days for the teachers, Sept. 25, Oct. 23, Jan. 22, Feb. 26 and April 23. “Those are just days for our teachers to continue to learn, work together in our collaborative teams, talk about teaching strategies and what’s working, what’s not working, talking about interventions and how can we better help and serve students,” Gee said.
Gee said the other factor that came into play with the new calendar is an extended Christmas break, due to where the date falls on the calendar. “The kids are actually going to have two full weeks off at Christmas. So there’s going to be five less student days, but we go by hours, and you have to have 1,080 hours,” he said.
The new calendar will still give the students 1,134.5 hours, which is 54 hours over the minimum time. Also, last year the Iowa legislature started allowing school districts to do five days of E-learning. “So this year the two snow days that Clear Lake has had, we’ve done those as E-learning days. So that means those hours are counting towards kid’s hours,” Gee said.
In addition to the professional development days and extra Christmas break time, Gee said they built in a day off the Friday following parent/teacher conferences in the fall, kept the floating work day for staff in August and the teacher work day on the first day back from winter break. Before heading into action items the Board heard a presentation from the Central Rivers Area Education Agency. Melissa Hesner, a Regional Administrator and site supervisor for Clear Lake schools said, ”We’re here to create an awareness regarding the services of Central Rivers AEA and highlight some of the ways in which Clear Lake is currently utilizing those services…If current legislation is passed as written it will drastically impact AEAs as we know them.”
Several AEA professionals talked about the services they bring to Clear Lake such as, special education resources for speech, physical and occupational therapy; language pathologists; audiologists; and Early Access and Early Childhood services that support the developmental needs of children from birth to five-years-old, just to name a few.
For the past 50 years AEAs have been funded by a “flow through” concept from legislatively determined amounts of property tax dollars and state funds that literally “flow through” local school district budgets to the AEA. The proposed legislation would let school districts contract for AEA services or give them the option to hire outside service providers.
Hesner showed the Board a side-by-side financial breakdown of the cost of their services vs. finding someone else to provide the same services. “It’s a difficult time for us. We don’t know what’s going to happen with our AEA system. But, we can guarantee that through this, we are going to still provide you undisrupted services whatever might come. And if there’s a transition then we will make sure that transition is as smooth as possible,” she said.
