MARFA — Marfa ISD has applied for a professional development minutes waiver and amended the current school year calendar to reflect changes necessary to meet the 75,600 student instructional minutes required by the Texas Education Agency.
Superintendent Stephen McCanless told The Big Bend Sentinel that after some calculations, he discovered that the calendar approved last February, months before his arrival in the district, did not meet TEA minute standards. At that time, the board made the difficult decision to return to a five-day instructional week after three years of a four-day work week.
Among other changes, the previously approved calendar required students and teachers to attend early release days Monday, November 23, and Tuesday, November 24, of Thanksgiving week, with Wednesday through Friday off.
“I started working on the calendar and realized, regardless of Thanksgiving week, the minutes were short across the district,” said McCanless. “Because when you create a calendar and you give half days off during the year, you have to go in and subtract those half-day minutes because they are not instructional minutes … and then looking at the true bell times start and end times, I realized elementary was almost 3,000 minutes short for the year.”
McCanless also said that the two minutes between classes at the junior high and high school were not properly calculated and had to be subtracted from the overall instructional minute calendar, adding to the deficit.
A solution was found in TEA’s professional development minutes waiver, offered to five-day school districts. The waiver is for staff development, not student instruction, and only applies to staff development that replaces student instruction during the school year. It can be used at the district’s discretion for student early release and whole staff development days or a combination of both, which Marfa ISD implemented in the revised calendar.
“So the new calendar corrects the minimum minutes,” McCanless said. “And even after doing all that, I was still able to give the whole week of Thanksgiving off, and it did not affect our minimum minutes. So it’s a much more user-friendly calendar. It’s better for families.”
