Hawaii public schools go to 4 day school week

[waialua359]

Due to the bad economy and major budget shortfalls, the DOE, State, and our Union agreed to furloughs that essentially creates at least 1 day/week off (due to holiday or furlough) for the remainder of our school year.

Our teachers need to now ratify the contract in order for it to take place.

We were told that the school needs to shut down on the furlough days and that no robotics activity can take place. My concern is during the 6 week construction period, where our team meets every single day.

[Rich Kressly]

Sorry to hear that. There are, however lots of teams that meet less than every day. We meet twice per week and once on the weekend during build. OUr robots certainly aren't as advanced as many, but we do indeed get by pretty well with our schedule. Good luck, these changes/obstacles are never easy.

[Chris is me]

The solution would have to be either working offsite, appealing to the School Board to get keys to the shop, or working a few days a week. All of them are doable, none of them especially ideal.

Perhaps find a team whose shop is open on the furlough days and do some fabrication there?

[Raul]

Ok, I am more concerned about how the students get a proper education when the rest of the world is going to more school hours instead of less.

[JohnBoucher]

Can you provide a link to a news article?

[Jared Russell]

Originally Posted by Raul

Ok, I am more concerned about how the students get a proper education when the rest of the world is going to more school hours instead of less.

EDIT: I had originally thought that they would add the hours onto the other four days, thus saving on overhead (HVAC, power, staff) costs slightly, but according to this article it looks like they are eliminating 17 school days all together.

I now fully echo Raul's concern...

[Andrew Schreiber]

Originally Posted by Raul

Ok, I am more concerned about how the students get a proper education when the rest of the world is going to more school hours instead of less.

<made irrelevant>
Well, that depends, if you extend the day so classes are 25% longer you get the same amount of instructional time, if you tack on 15 minutes to a 60 minute period over the 4 days you recoup the lost day.
</irrelevant>

However, I have a feeling there are many places schools could cut costs short of cutting class time and also echo Raul's concern.

My hunch for why they are doing this is so they dont have to run the school one more day. After experiencing the heat in Hawaii I can assume that cooling is a huge cost. Based on this assumption (which is purely speculation and can in no way be taken as fact) it would make no sense to allow teams to meet during those days off because it defeats the whole point. Best bet is to develop a new work schedule based around fewer meeting days. Many teams do not meet everyday and it works ok for them.

[waialua359]

Originally Posted by Jared341

EDIT: I had originally thought that they would add the hours onto the other four days, thus saving on overhead (HVAC, power, staff) costs slightly, but according to this article it looks like they are eliminating 17 school days all together.

I now fully echo Raul's concern...

Jared,
Yes, they chose 17 days because it amounts to those weeks that have no holidays/other things going on.........that would cause students to miss school.
It was either this or massive layoffs and I am a firm believer that massive layoffs would have hurt the schools even more.

Society is willing to spend more money to fix prisons and pay out welfare checks, instead of putting/keeping money in education which is the backbone of our country. Go figure.

[yodameister]

One benefit to the 4 day week is that buses operate 20% less. Busing is very expensive to districts.

[Rich Kressly]

Originally Posted by Jared341

EDIT: I had originally thought that they would add the hours onto the other four days, thus saving on overhead (HVAC, power, staff) costs slightly, but according to this article it looks like they are eliminating 17 school days all together.

I now fully echo Raul's concern...

I had exactly the same thought process and, thus, now echo Raul and Jared.

[JB987]

Glenn,
I wonder how a Friday is any different than a weekend day? Didn't you previously work on weekends? And isn't a Friday under this scenario just one more weekend day?

[BrendanB]

Are they possibly going to give kids more homework to do on the days that they have off? If not, how are they getting away with this.

However, there definitely is stuff that you could do out of the shop during build season.

[Mr. Pockets]

Originally Posted by Jared341

EDIT: I had originally thought that they would add the hours onto the other four days, thus saving on overhead (HVAC, power, staff) costs slightly, but according to this article it looks like they are eliminating 17 school days all together.

I now fully echo Raul's concern...

You know, at when I first read the title of the article, I couldn't help but think that you guys were really lucky (I mean what kid doesn't want an extended weekend). But after you guys reinserted reality to the mix that attitude has sort of deflated. I agree totally with Raul. Especially for those involved in AP classes losing half a month of school will be a massive pain (not to mention a tremendous disadvantage on the tests).

Originally Posted by waialua359

We were told that the school needs to shut down on the furlough days and that no robotics activity can take place. My concern is during the 6 week construction period, where our team meets every single day.

As for the issue of a limited build schedule I'm a tad curious. Does this no activity directive also carry over to include the weekends as well? If it's just one weekday it shouldn't be to difficult to adapt to, but a weekday and the whole weekend might make things a tad more more interesting. Best of luck either way.

[waialua359]

Originally Posted by JB987

Glenn,
I wonder how a Friday is any different than a weekend day? Didn't you previously work on weekends? And isn't a Friday under this scenario just one more weekend day?

Joe,
At first, that's what I thought.........just like a weekend day.
But later, was told otherwise by our admin, but they are not 100% sure.

I wonder if its because of cutting other costs, such as electricity. Our athletic director also said that they were talking about rescheduling football games also that fell on a furlough day.

I guess it remains to be seen.

AP teachers have been in great discussion the past several days. Based on our school schedule, kids will lose out of 40% of AP instruction time per week. Ouch!

[Tristan Lall]

I had the same thoughts as Rich et al.....

This reminds me a little of what we in Ontario called "Rae days", after the Ontario premier who, in 1993, introduced something similar for most provincial workers. It did not enjoy the support of the major public service workers' unions, and was unpopular among my teachers at the time (presumably because their pay was being cut despite their collective bargaining agreement).

(What happened to the premier, Bob Rae? His party was soundly defeated in the next provincial election, mostly because of the unpopularity of this program.)

As implemented in the Scarborough public schools, Rae days were a bit different from what's apparently being proposed in Hawaii. Many of the unpaid days were concatenated on to the March break (and similar things), rather than cancelling two of every five Fridays.

How long is the Hawaii school year, anyway? Around 180 instructional days per annum?