Dateline: January 13, 2005

Clarendon, Hedley schools seek waivers

By Roger Estlack, Clarendon Enterprise

Clarendon and Hedley school officials are taking formal steps to file for state waivers to start the 2005-2006 school year earlier than allowed by state law.

Superintendent Monty Hysinger said the CISD Board of Trustees formally voted to seek the waiver Monday night, following a public hearing held last month.

That follows the same action taken by Hedley trustees on December 20.

“We’re interested in ending the semester before Christmas in order to help our students on finals and especially help our teachers with curriculums,” Hysinger said.

State law mandates that public schools not begin their fall semesters before the Monday in the week that contains August 21, which means the earliest school could legally start this year is Monday, August 22.

“That could put us about a week behind,” Hysinger said.

CISD wants to begin its school year on Thursday, August 18, with two in-service days for teachers, and then begin classes on August 22.  HISD is seeking to start classes Monday, August 15.

“The spring semester is typically five or six days longer than the fall semester,” Hysinger said. “That’s okay because those days are taken up by TAKS testing.

“If we get our waiver, then we’ll have 87 class days in the fall and 93 days in the spring. But without the waiver we’ll have 85 days in the fall and 95 days in the spring.”

Hysinger said such a difference could push fall semester finals past the Christmas break and would be especially troubling in high school where students take courses that are only one semester long.

“I think there is a good chance our waiver will be approved unless politics in the Legislature overrides us,” Hysinger said. “We won’t know until mid-March, but that doesn’t mean the Legislature can’t come back and say ‘no’ to the waivers. You know, what happened to local control? There’s no local control any more.”

Hedley Superintendent Bryan Hill has the same concerns as his Clarendon counterpart and said almost all the schools he knows of in this area are applying for the same waiver.

Hill also questions why the state would have a rule about when to start the year and then not require everyone to follow it.

“They say [getting a waiver] is not hard to do as long as you go through the steps,” Hill said. “If everyone can get a waiver, then why have the rule? They need to just leave us alone and let us start when we want to.”