The start and end dates of school have been a topic of conversation for years. Parents reminiscence about starting school after Labor Day and ending school before Memorial Day.

Those days are history. Those were days when the Indiana Department of Education required only 170 days of student attendance, and there wasn’t a requirement to make up snow days.

The current requirement of 180 days has been in place for many years, as well as making up lost days due to weather.

In fact, if you only take off for national holidays and the day after Thanksgiving and Christmas, there are not 180 possible school days between Labor Day and Memorial Day.

During the 2008-09 school year, we surveyed our parents and community members about school calendars. We did not simply ask about the starting date.

We posted two complete calendars with one calendar starting August 12 and ending May 28, and a second calendar starting August 19 and ending June 4. These calendars also included all breaks and days off.

We did this so parents could see the impact of any change. It is easy to ask about an isolated event, e.g. start date, but when you see what the ending date will be, the opinion may change.

The survey asked parents to weigh in on the starting day, and also provide any comments about any aspect of the calendar, particularly the days off. These were our results from nearly 500 responses:

By a 3-to-2 margin the parents wanted the early start date because in looking at the entire calendar, they wanted to be out by Memorial Day.

Parents loved being off the Wednesday before Thanksgiving break. This is the most traveled holiday and being able to leave after school on Tuesday helped in reaching family destinations and did not impact attendance on Tuesday.

Parents wanted a two-week winter break.

Parents overwhelmingly wanted a full week of spring break.

Parents did not want snow days built into the calendar. They wanted them added at the end.

We have based our calendar for the next two years on this input as well as the input from our teaching staff. Plus our building administrators are in constant contact with parents and provided input on what they’d been hearing. We will do another survey in order to see whether things should remain as they are currently or if there is a different preference, or perhaps there will be different state requirements that influence the calendar.

There are a few other factors that influence our school calendar. In Hamilton County, all districts share special education services and have some joint classes. We have a class that is too small for just Westfield students, so we have some students with certain handicapping conditions from other districts attending here. We also send some of our students to other districts, so there is a need to keep calendars fairly closely aligned.

Our vocational students at the high school go to J. Everett Light Career Center by North Central High School, so we need to be fairly close to that calendar.

Many districts start in order for their semester to end and finals to be given by the winter break. That is not a concern for us, as we’re on trimesters, but the previous reasons create a need for alignment.

ISTEP-plus testing was never a factor in our calendar.

It seems easy to discuss a single point in time, but every action has a reaction, and to move the start date back means you move the end back or shorten a break, etc. That is why we posted the entire calendar, so parents and community members could study it and give thoughtful input, which they did and we considered when constructing the calendar.