An administration proposal to start the school year at Oak Park and River Forest High School later in August and push first semester final exams into January after the Winter Break was met with skepticism from the OPRF school board at the school board’s Committee of the Whole Meeting last week.
The school’s calendar committee, which is made of 10 school employees: three administrators, three teachers, and four representatives of other bargaining units at the school, recommended returning to a schedule similar to the one used until the 2012-13 school year. It starts classes a little later in August and moves first-semester finals to January to even out the days in each semester. Such a calendar would also allow OPRF to start the school year at around the same time as the elementary school districts in Oak Park and River Forest do.
In contrast, a recent trend among high schools has been to start in mid-August so that first semester finals are taken before Christmas Break.
OPRF Principal Lynda Parker sent out an email to parents Dec. 4 outlining the proposal. The email and a memorandum to the board said that the school board would vote on the proposal at its Dec. 21 meeting. “Hold on, not so fast,” was the reaction from the school board.
“This gives me great pause and concern because we’re going backwards,” said school board member Fred Arkin, noting the calendar was changed so that students don’t have to worry about finals over the Winter Break.
Arkin said that the school should get input from those who would be most affected by the change before changing the calendar.
“We should get input from our students and our families,” Arkin said. “This isn’t something that we’ve been looking at for a long time or expecting to come up almost immediately and I just think we need to take a pause and we need to have more discussion and more study.”
Other school board members agreed.
District 200 board president Tom Cofksy, whose five children all graduated from OPRF, said that his children went to OPRF under both calendars and that his kids whose took finals before Christmas were relieved not to have to worry about school over the Winter Break.
“I do remember the relief of being done,” Cofsky said.
But board member Jonathan Livingston said that there would be some benefit to some students to have first semester final exams in January, saying that it would give students more time to study for finals. Board member Audrey Williams-Lee also appeared to be sympathetic to the proposed change in the calendar.
Parker said that the main reason for recommending the change in the calendar was to equal out the number of days in each semester. There are six more school days in the second semester because of the number of holidays in the first one.
As a result, students who take semester-long classes, such as civics, have what Parker described as a “richer experience” if they take the class in the second semester. Parker framed the issue as one of equity, saying that the difference in school days between semesters could range from six to 10 under the current calendar.
Parker said that if the calendar were changed, teachers would be told not to assign work to be done during the Christmas Break.
“The intention is not to have students do study or work over the break,” Parker told the school board.
Cofsky wanted to know how many semester-long classes there are.
“It seems like the tail is wagging the dog,” he said.
Cofsky said that he has asked some students about the proposed change and said that their initial reaction was negative.
Under the calendar’s committee’s proposal, next year’s classes would begin Aug.19 for freshmen and Aug. 20 for all other students. The final day of the first semester would be Jan 17.
School board member Tim Brandhorst said he was also hesitant about moving first-semester finals to January and asked whether the school has considered eliminating final exams entirely. Johnson said that school administrators were in the kicking-the-tires phase of thinking about eliminating final exams entirely.
Board member Graham Brisben said that he wanted to get feedback from students before making a change in the calendar.
“I’m really interested in the voice of students,” Brisben said. “We need to consider this a lot further.”
The administration got the message and will not bring the proposed calendar change to the school board at the Dec. 21 meeting.
“Our team is going to go back and take a look at this before bringing it back to the board for next steps,” Johnson said.
After the meeting, Johnson said that the proposal to change to school calendar had nothing to do with the start of the construction project, known as Project 2 this summer.
“Nothing to do with Project 2 at all, absolutely nothing to do with Project 2,” Johnson said in response to Wednesday Journal’s question. “This came independently through conversations with the calendar committee. It wasn’t driven by Project 2 at all.”