BUFFALO (WBEN - Brendan Keany) - With the recent dispute in the Buffalo Public Schools regarding the academic calendar, the topic of creating and planning for an entire scholastic year appears fairly daunting.
Holidays, recesses, testing schedules, teacher contracts are all factors that go into creating an calendar for a school district, so how does an administration put together an effective schedule that works for staff, parents and most importantly, students?
"The first thing that we do when we start developing the calendar for an academic year is look at the BOCES calendar," said Michael Cornell, who serves as superintendent for Hamburg School District.
It may seem odd, but it actually makes a lot of sense. There are numerous kids from each school district in Western New York who enroll in various BOCES programs, so meeting the needs of those students, or at least attempting to, is a good place to start. In fact, local school districts base a majority of their individual calendars around the base calendar created by the four BOCES programs in the region, as Cornell alluded to.
Dr. Lynn Fusco is the district superintendent and CEO for Erie 1 BOCES, and she says representative superintendents from Erie 1 and 2 BOCES, as well as Orleans Niagara BOCES and Cattaraugus-Allegany BOCES, work together to create a calendar that takes into account the aforementioned factors.
Then each of the BOCES districts must approve that calendar.
"The school boards of the BOCES adopt what we call the Western New York Joint Management Team calendar, and it's a draft," said Fusco. "That draft is then used by individual districts to design their calendars. We try to design a calendar that can be used as a base, so that each district can then apply their own particular, unique set of circumstances to."
"We have many students who participate in that programming, so we try to make sure that our calendar mirrors as closely as possible to the BOCES calendar," he said. "For every day we're not on the BOCES calendar, it really creates a couple days of disruption for a student."
For example, if a student is supposed to attend their BOCES classes during the morning and then join their traditional district setting in the afternoon, it throws the entire day off for them if one has a scheduled off day and the other doesn't. This would likely create a couple of half-days for the student, and Cornell noted that many students would simply skip the entire day as opposed to going in for half.
Of course, not everything is usually going to align perfectly.
"I think it's a balance like many things," said Cornell. "Most districts would acknowledge the benefit of sticking as close to a BOCES calendar as possible while also recognizing the fact that each school district has its own unique, community-based characteristics and it's own board of education."
At the end of the day, Cornell says it simply comes down to making the most convenient and logical decisions that will ultimately benefit students and parents.
"In my own mind, and the way we think about it in Hamburg, and I think many of my colleagues do it the same way, you really want to make sure that the way you set up the calendar doesn't put students and families at a disadvantage in terms of their ability to attend their BOCES program," he said.
