A Senate Study Committee charged with looking at the possibility of backing up the start of the school year issued a report Thursday that supports longer summer breaks and includes “guard rails” for local school boards to follow when setting their calendars for upcoming school years. The “guard rails,” committee members said, will protect local control — something they said was a repeating theme in comments they heard during public hearings.
Recommendations included mandating that public schools set a start date no earlier than 7-10 days prior to the first Monday in September, with an end date on or around June 1. The committee recognized that the recommendations could cause changes in some active school calendars and could impact testing dates.
The 11-member committee voted 9-0 to approve the recommendations. Two members of the committee — which included four state senators, several representatives from Georgia’s travel and tourism industries, and a member of the state school board — were absent.
Committee chairman State Sen. Steve Gooch (R-Dahlonega), recommended schools delay administering their Milestones and End-Of-Course tests to later in the year to maximize classroom instruction time. He also recommended the state Board of Education look at ways to coordinate local school calendars with those of the Technical College System of Georgia and the University System of Georgia to accommodate the number of students taking advantage of the state’s dual enrollment program.
The recommendations recognized the opportunities of summer employment in Georgia and the importance of these in developing soft skills and life skills training for the ”future leaders in our workforce.”
The recommendations also included a series of findings by the committee — including the importance of school nutrition and the challenges of finding childcare for short breaks throughout the year.
The committee members warned against the impact different school calendars have on Georgia’s travel and tourism industries.
When adopting the recommendations, committee members agreed that during the hearings they heard no testimony that mandatory-minimum start dates would have a negative impact on educational outcomes – that most of the concern was around “local control.”
The Senate Study Committee on Evaluating the School Year Calendar of Georgia Public Schools was created by the passage of Senate Resolution 1068 during the 2018 Legislative Session. The committee was tasked with reviewing the effect of varied school start dates on the travel and hospitality industries while ensuring that there be no disruption to the education of Georgia’s children.
