Board Approves 2024-25 School Calendar Minus Early Friday Release

A proposed 2 p.m. early release every Friday for the 2024-2025 school year drew comments and concerns from community members and educators, voiced during public forum at the March 11 Wessington Springs School District Board of Education meeting. At the April board meeting, the school calendar was revisited on the agenda after additional discussion with teachers and the community between the March and April meetings.

The committee charged with overseeing the calendar, made up of boardmembersSaraThompson, Jennifer Jensen and Darrick Van Dyke made the recommendation to not approve the 2024-25 school calendar as presented.

“The bottom line is I can’t support something the majority of teachers aren’t fully on board with yet. I am looking for more engagement and discussion with teachers since they are the ones predominantly impacted. I want to see something most people support,” Thompson said.

Jensen also weighed in on the need to analyze the topic of early release for lesson planning and analyzing data further, “Let’s research more, visit with the teachers, identify what we want to achieve, have a plan of action on different levels of high school and elementary school on what’s going to take place. Let’s analyze every detail of how this will affect our teachers and students down the road.”

Thompson addressed Superintendent Dr. Michael Ormsmith and commended him for recognizing a need for change but commented that more engagement is needed with teachers.

“It’syourroletoproposechanges, but to have the teachers present at last month’s board meeting as passionately as they did, we need to get together more meaningfully. For me as a committee member and not knowing what the committee was supposed to do, there are some conversations we need to have,” Thompson said.

School board member Dustin Weber responded, “You can talk about something until you’re blue in the face but no one will know how it’ll go until we do it. We can get everyone involved in the same room and talk about it for weeks and weeks. Once you move forward and go to do it, then you can make tweaks.”

Jensen responded to Weber’s comment saying, “We need to identify an action plan and determine how we’ll do it. Then we will do tweaks.”

Ormsmith said the action plan will be developed with staff in the coming year and added that by not approving the early release, teachers would have to analyze data on their own time.

“Work with collecting data and reporting to administrators will happen. Period,” Ormsmith stated. “This time was aimed to give them time to do it. Now they will have to do it on their own. As we develope the action plan we will see if they realize the benefit of having that time at the end of the week rather than doing it on their own time.”

Van Dyke moved to approve the 202425 school calendar without the 2 p.m. early release on Fridays.

All but one school board member approved the motion. Weber responded with nay.

The approved school calendar can be found on the school district’s website.