With a 3-2 vote, the School Committee voted in favor of starting the 2025 school year before Labor Day this fall.
The students will have a “soft start” with a two-day school week beginning Wednesday, Aug. 27, but they will have that Friday and the following Monday off from school.
“It allows some teachers to really do the get-to-know-you activities in a way that they can get to understand the kids in front of them so that when they come back from Labor Day, they can hit the ground running and go for it,” Interim Superintendent John Robidoux said.
Sarah Fox, a school committee member, voted against this calendar because she said the only formal feedback the committee received was parents asking for the school year to start after Labor Day.
“We received (feedback) from a special education parent asking to start after, and she talked about how that start, stop, start, stop with the gaps is really hard on special education students, which was one of the driving forces as to why we stopped doing it this way and moved to a different format a few years ago,” Fox said.
Robidoux said he had received positive feedback for the calendar change, and that he would share that with the school board after the meeting.
The other committee member to vote against this calendar was Vice Chair Alison Taylor, but she was quick to emphasize that she did not disagree with any of the reasons Robidoux shared. She said she voted against this calendar because she didn’t feel like 2025 was the year to implement this shift.
“I just feel like these children have been through so, so, so much, and this isn’t the year for it,” Taylor said. “If it wasn’t this year and everyone hadn’t gone through three weeks of strikes and losing all these vacations as a result of that, I would support it.”
School Committee Chair Jenn Schaeffner and members Brian Ota and Al Williams were the trio to vote in favor of the 2025-26 calendar.
Schaeffner said she voted in favor of the calendar change to ensure the calendar could account for the 180 school days mandated by the State as well as five potential snow days and two teacher preparation days prior to the students’ first day of school.
She added that this year, the Jewish High Holidays Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur fall on weekdays, which gives the students a total of three additional days off this fall that needed to be accounted for.
Schaeffner said starting before Labor Day will still allow the students and staff to still finish out the year in mid-to-late June.
