Mineola Board of Ed Adopts August Start for 2012-13

Students in the Mineola School District will be starting next school year after the approved with August 29 and 30 being days of classes for students. 

“Why we’re opting for this is because it opens up the rest of the calendar, it allows us to have a snow day in May,” superintendent Dr. Michael Nagler said at the March 15 meeting of the board at the . “If that snow day’s not used, that’s a day off before the Memorial (Day) break which we have had in our calendars before.”

The August start date also allows the school buildings to not hold classes on election day, avoiding the issues of residents coming into the elementary schools at that time.

The state requires 180 days of classes and Mineola has 182 days per its teachers contract. If the number of class days falls below 180, the district loses a portion of state aid. According to the state, the 180 days must fall between Labor Day and the last day of Regents exams, which as the state education department originally indicated that the last day of Regents exams – June 21 – would move up by a minimum of 3 days.

“They have recanted that due to the settlement of the APPR which requires the teacher reporting of their scores to be by September 1, so there’s not a rush to get the scores back,” Dr. Nagler said. “That was the impetus of why they lifted the days.”

If the school district began the year after Labor Day they would lose May 24 and the ability to hold a snow day as well as having to hold classes on election day. The district is also obligated to have a minimum of 4 half-days up to a total of seven as per the teachers’ contract.

The superintendent answered in the affirmative to a question by board president Christine Napolitano that the pre-Labor Day start “actually gives us some more wiggle room as opposed to the other one.”

Dr. Nagler said that “we’ll try to do some, a lot of the housekeeping that we normally do during the first week of September, in particular we’ll try to get a lot of the benchmark assessment, the NWEA done – it is not the reason we’re starting early, it’s just something we can do if we start early.”

He also assured parents that while all school days are important, if students happen to miss those two days “we will be able to make up that time with your children and everything will be fine.”