Durango School District 9-R is ceasing its plans to elongate the school calendar.
Since last year, a committee of school board members and district Superintendent Daniel Snowberger had studied whether adopting a nine-weeks-on, two-weeks-off calendar would improve students’ academic performance.
Numerous studies undertaken in the last decade have found that schoolchildren benefit from year-round schooling, or school calendars that are premised on frequent, similarly sized breaks.
Research has shown that in comparison with their year-round student counterparts in Singapore and England, American schoolchildren forget a great deal of the knowledge and skills they learned during their unusually long, three-month summers, which critics say are based on a 19th-century agrarian calendar that has little to do with many modern schoolchildren’s lives.
The school calendar traditionally is a sensitive issue for the school district, with city parents protesting that proposed calendar changes would interfere with their skiing holidays and county parents objecting that they would prevent their children’s participation in the La Plata County Fair.
District spokeswoman Julie Popp said though research had persuaded the district’s calendar committee that a longer school calendar would be optimal, it is abandoning its plans to switch to a nine-weeks-on, two-weeks-off calendar because heat waves in late August and September had made classrooms too hot for students to learn.
She said only two district schools have air conditioning, and given the school’s $1.6 million budget deficit and many district school buildings’ outdated electrical and heating systems, purchasing air conditioners for overheated schools was not feasible.
For the last few weeks, schools throughout the country have been shut down because of unprecedented temperatures that made students too miserable to learn.
Popp said parents also had written Durango School District 9-R, complaining their children couldn’t concentrate.
She said given global warming, summers were likely to get longer and hotter, meaning that even historically tepid months such as September and May might become untenably sweltering.
“Students can’t learn if they’re physically uncomfortable,” she said.
Popp said some schools, such as Sunnyside Elementary where classrooms face south and west, had it much worse than others.
Sunnyside Principal Vanessa Fischer said last week that the school’s parent organization became extremely concerned about the heat, with one mother using a special thermometer to take temperatures in various classrooms.
Fischer said the mother found that last week the average daily temperature at 2:30 p.m. was 86 degrees – hours after the school had cooled from the peak heat time around 11 a.m.
“And the cafeteria was about 92 degrees,” she said.
Fischer said the school tried to mitigate the heat by purchasing foam tinting for windows in one classroom. Though the foam tinting cost $800, it only succeeded in cooling the room by a few degrees, she said. She wasn’t sure the cost was worth it.
The heat was deeply unconducive to instruction, making children distracted, lessons wretched and teaching disrupted.
“We want kids to stay hydrated, so, of course, we let them go fill up their water bottles,” Fischer said. “But that means they’re leaving the classroom and missing out on instruction.”
“Last week, I had the pleasure of teaching third-grade math,” she said. “I was sweating, they were sweating, filling up their water bottles, going to the bathroom – it was really unpleasant.”
cmcallister@durangoherald.com
