The district schedule, relatively unchanged for more than a decade, is due for a face lift.

Thus, this past Thursday the USD 383 School Schedule Reorganization Committee met for the eighth time this year. Teachers and faculty from across the district once again met to discuss the future of USD 383, this time bringing what Assistant Superintendent and committee co-chair Eric Reid described as “Edutopias” to the table.

After some initial discussion of the problems surrounding the current district schedule as brought to light by a teacher and faculty survey, the committee is now firmly in the idea stage.

“The committee determined questions that we believed could help us build some solutions,” Reid said. “The committee worked to narrow down the questions, and we adjusted how we asked those questions in order to get accurate responses.  Our district expert on data helped us formulate the questions in the survey form and allowed us to get responses from most of our licensed teachers across the district.”

The committee then looked through the responses to find trends and areas where there was willingness for adjustments.

“Those [surveys] generated a trend,” co-chair James Neff said. “We looked, basically, at what type of comments came up most often. So, a lot of people, their focus is time; they need more time to work with their kids and everything else. Time, time, time, it’s all about time. Once we got past that we started throwing ideas out. How can we satisfy our goals, build a district wide schedule framework that provides the time needed to do all of the things we need to do that’s not teaching without taking away from teaching. We’ve got all of these other things we’ve got to do, but it takes away from the classroom, which is why we’re here. We’re starting to build those ideas together. Right now we’re strictly at the idea stage. We’re just trying to build a better mousetrap and we’ve got all kinds of ideas.”

This past week, elementary, middle school and high school faculty members on the committee presented their ideal schedule situations.

“We didn’t get too detailed in it,” member Lisa Heller said. “We focused more on the amount of professional development and collaboration.”

The high school ideal schedule plan keeps the current ratio of content to hours the same, having teachers teach content five of the seven hours of the day. However, it would replace the current plan and collaboration time for two hours with one hour of plan and one of “Direct Support.”

“That hour of Direct Support could be a guided study hall, a regular study hall, an MTSS (Multi-Tiered Support System) team, something in which teachers are working directly with students,” Heller said.

Such a system would allow teachers to teach a sixth hour without overload pay, making it so overload is only available if a teacher gives up their one hour of plan a day and teaches for all seven hours of the day. The high school “Edutopia” also featured either late start or early release days in which teachers would gain pack their lost collaboration time. In order to ensure that no collaboration time is lost from the additional instruction throughout the day, the high school group also suggested that three times a month students would be at school for activities other than class (i.e. Olweus, picture day, etc.) in which faculty would be on a 1/3 rotation, giving teachers an additional two collaboration times per month.

“The high school has a scheduling committee that’s working within the building,” assistant principal and committee member Angie Messer said. “This has come from that group of people and then we just tweaked it a little bit. It’s definitely still a work in progress at this point.”

At the elementary level, the main concern was aligning the district calendar across all levels and, overall, ensuring uniformity across the entire district. Similarly to the high school, the plan involves ensuring more five-day weeks for elementary students by moving prep, professional development and collaboration days either before or after already scheduled days or moving them to already-shortened weeks so as to increase contact with students over the course of a larger number of weeks. Similarly, the elementary plan also features early release or late starts. While the elementary level already institutes such days, the hope is to move them to a day other than Wednesdays and make that time more productively used.

“We spent quite a while trying to figure out what was practical,” Marlatt Elementary principal Brett Nelson said. “There’s a difference between having an idea and actually being able to implement it. There were some things that would be ideal for teachers, but we worried about the practicality of shortened weeks. We talked about increasing the number of early release and late starts, but that really cuts into instructional time; that time is really important. We really struggled with how we do the shortened days without adding a bunch of minutes to the school day because that’s not ideal either. We really ended up focusing on what we could do to keep instructional time but still meet the needs of the teachers as shown in the survey.”

The middle school plan was less focused on changing schedules as it was on ensuring uniformity within the current middle school model between the two schools.

“It kind of depends on what we decide here for our ideal plan,” middle school teacher Alicia Pecenka said. “We looked at what we currently have and looked at it at the standpoint of if there’s a late start we’d do this and if not we’d do that. Basically trying to maintain what we already have and make sure there’s consistency.”

The committee plans to continue to gain new perspectives and submit a final plan by Jan. 1 of this upcoming year. If all goes according to plan, the plan will be ratified in February.

“The hope is to benefit the faculty into making the time we have better suit their needs, and our hope is for a more equitable solution across the district,” Reid said.  “Impact on students couldn’t really be determined now with what we have, but it benefits students when teachers have the time to do what they need to do.”

While there is still much uncertainty as to what the future holds, the overarching goals of the committee are clear.

“My hope is that we can create a framework which will provide guidance and structure for buildings such that buildings can do what they need to do during the week,” Neff said. “We want to create something in which buildings have the freedom to create a daily schedule that works without creating inequities amongst teachers. I know we won’t please everybody, but we’re going to do what we can to make the best schedule possible.”

“It’s been a great process to have a great conversation on how we can improve our district and serve our students better,” Reid said. “This is a difficult task, but the committee has been communicating, listening and working to make us better.”