School District Error Costs Families a Month of Summer Vacation

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Education Policy and Improving K-12 Education

This would be my worst nightmare.

A school district in Southern California miscalculated the amount of instructional minutes students were in class on their shortened days. Due to state laws that essentially eliminated those days from consideration (instead of the 5-10 minutes they were short each of those days), students will need to attend another 34 full school days.

Parents are floored, as summer plans need to be cancelled--camps, vacations, and more. The district apologizes for the error, but the mistake could cost a cash strapped district $2 million in funds.

What would you do? Could you forgo your plans for a clerical error? Would you contact your state representative and try to get some leniency? Can you see another alternative?

The article appears here.

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Parent Replies to "School District Error Costs Families a Month of Summer Vacation"

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I know what you're saying MSMomm. My daughter's class had a picnic one day, a group sing along another, today they made ice cream and tomorrow is a half day. I like celebrating that the end of the school year is here, but it's a LOT of down time. If cutting out even half the celebrating would have allowed them to be out of school a few days early I would go for it.

While 10 days is better than 34 days, it's still going to be a major headache for some parents.

What bothers me about this is, during the last week or so before school ends, the kids aren't really doing a lot of educational things anyway. My son has had free play during P.E., and watching movies and playing games in his other classes. If schools were concerning about losing "educational" time, that's one thing, but having the kids do more "playing around" during these extra ten days is silly. JMO

I'm glad to hear they're working on some kind of compromise....I heard the administrator who made the error has retired....seems like there still ought to be some way to "dock their benefits," for making such a serious mistake that impacts so many people.

UPDATE:

It appears the California legislature is pressing ahead with a bill that will allow the students to attend only 10 days to make up the classtime. The update is located here: latimesblogs.latimes.com/lanow/2009/06/chino-unified-students-serving-34-extra-days-of-school-may-get-their-summer-vacations-back.html

I would hope that a legal compromise could be reached....If kids ended up being 10 minutes short of instructional time on 34 days, that's 340 minutes, or less than 6 hours. Have the kids make up one day, not a month, and have the administrators who made the miscalculations attend a couple of courses on basic math and school management!
Otherwise, the parents end up paying over and over for the district's mistakes....their own summer plans are impacted, and some education money comes from their taxes, so they'll likely end up having taxes raised again, to cover the school budget shortfall.

If I were in that situation, it would depend on what plans I had for the summer. If we had non-refundable plane tickets, then no, I wouldn't send my child to school for that time.

It also states in the article that, for the most part, the kids will be doing art, music and hands-on science projects. While there's certainly nothing wrong with these activities, kids are looking forward to other summer activities, like swimming, going to amusement parks, etc.

If my child needed to attend summer school anyway, then I would hope the school would offer classes that are needed, like math, language, science.

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School District Error Costs Families a Month of Summer Vacation

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