School districts usually approve school year calendars one year at a time, but the Shawano School Board took the unusual step Jan. 20 of approving calendars for the 2025-26 and 2026-27 school years at the recommendation of its referendum consultants, Hoffman Planning and Design.
Hoffman officials recommended setting calendars that would end the school year before Memorial Day and start them the day after Labor Day to give the renovation and expansion workers as much time as possible to work on projects without interfering with the regular flow of school days. State law generally allows for schools to start on or after Sept. 1, and school years for Shawano have usually concluded the first week of June.
The approved calendars still keep in the traditional week-long breaks for spring break and the week of Thanksgiving, and only one professional development day, where students get the day off while educators go through updated learning practices, was eliminated. However, staff also get an additional floating work day to compensate for the possibility that some classrooms might need to move around during construction.
The calendars, by adopting the setup, reduce the number of student days from 173 to 167, but they will add 15 minutes to the start of each school day, allowing Shawano to have the required number of minutes prescribed by the Wisconsin Department of Public Instruction.
According to Superintendent Kurt Krizan, the number of staff days would decrease, as well, but the extra time for each school day would be compensated.
“There were a lot of parameters we looked at,” Krizan said. “Looking at those parameters, something had to give.”
Krizan said the district sent out a survey to staff to see what changes would be acceptable and what should remain in the calendar. About 55.6% of the 195 surveys received favored keeping in the Thanksgiving break, he said, while 75.6% favored keeping spring break at a full week.
About 44.6% favored keeping the early release times on Wednesdays, where elementary and middle schools release at 1:45 p.m., while the high school releases at 2 p.m., Krizan said.
“We were able to achieve all of the things that were priorities in the calendar by adding 15 minutes to the start of the school day for the next two years,” Krizan said.
Questions had been raised prior to the board meeting about how the school year calendar would affect the high school’s scheduling. Krizan said that nothing has been decided yet about school day scheduling.
“These are mutually exclusive events,” he said. “Adding 15 minutes to the school day does not automatically trigger a change in the actual day-to-day operations at the high school. There needs to be conversations about that.”
The superintendent told the board this was the best scenario to work around construction.
“This is the lesser of several evils,” Krizan said.
The calendars passed by a 7-1 vote, with board member Frank Kugel voting against them. Kugel said that the school board should have had some input on the calendars because families communicate their issues with board members.
“Yes, I was a teacher for a long time, and I know how certain people vote, but I look at a week for deer hunting and a week of spring break, there’s quite a few people across the board that I visited with who tell me they don’t need that time,” Kugel said. “They just need a day or two, or a long weekend. If you’re asking for six days, instead of doing 15 minutes early, we cut three days off of here and three days off of here, and we have our six days.”
Krizan said that the high approval rates for the Thanksgiving and spring breaks were unusual, noting that when three options are offered on a survey, trends move toward all three responses receiving similar favorability. He added that Kobussen Buses, which provides the district’s transportation, and the local parochial schools that receive district transportation, favored the new setup.
“I know this isn’t a popular option, but it was able to preserve as much of the traditional pieces of the calendar that we could and also give our staff some of the time away,” Krizan said.
lpulaski@newmedia-wi.com
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