School Calendar for 2008-2009

On Monday night, the Board Education approved the calendar for the 2008-2009 school year. The link to the calendar is here. You will also notice a link on the sidebar.

Dr. Horton's recommendation did include one change from the option presented. Option 3 originally included a holiday on April 10 (Good Friday). Instead, we will have a holiday on April 13. The reasoning for the change was two-fold:

1. April 10 concludes the window for testing and is a valuable day to conduct make-up tests. Because of the requirement that we test 95% of not only all students, but 95% of students in each subgroup, one student can make a big difference, and one more available day to conduct that testing can make a big difference.
2. Representatives from Talladega City, Talladega County, Sylacauga City, AIDB, and CACC sat down at the same table to examine the calendar options of each other in an attempt to see if we could align our calendars while at the same time giving our individual school systems autonomy. That experiment worked surprising well. Moving our holiday from April 10 to April 13 put us in line with our neighbors.

You will notice two significant points about this calendar:

1. Both students and teachers have an entire week for Thanksgiving.
2. The school year will end a week later than normal. This allows us a little "breathing room" in terms of weather days and race weekends.