The 2020-21 school year calendar was approved Thursday by the Warsaw School Board.
“Usually, we’re not talking about the next school calendar only two months in advance,” Superintendent Dr. David Hoffert said.
Warsaw Community Schools is not really changing the dates on its calendars.
The start date for students will stay the same at Aug. 18.
“We do plan to have that live and in-person,” Hoffert said. The school corporation will be making announcements “in the coming days” on what exactly that looks like. “We do not, again I repeat do not, plan to go every other day or orange and black days or every other week or a modified schedule inside of it or having some students starting in the morning and come in later. Those are not things we have planned as a local school system.”
Although the start date remains the same, there will be some schedule changes for the 2020-21 school year.
There will be a shift in students’ late-arrival days. Traditionally, students have had late-arrival days on Thursdays, where they would come in 50 minutes later. “We are shifting that from Thursday to Monday,” Hoffert said.
The reason for the shift is because WCS is going to have a deep clean that takes place in the schools and the school corporation needs a three-day period in order to do that. Coupled with the breaks that were already scheduled, that would give WCS an opportunity to do the deep cleans every other week.
During those deep cleaning days, teachers and students will be in session but it will be through remote learning on those Mondays.
Those remote learning days will be Sept. 21, Oct. 5, Nov. 9, Dec. 7, Jan 18, Feb. 1, March 8 and 22, April 19 and May 3.
The 2020-21 school year may be the only school year WCS does this, but it may later think it is good common practice, Hoffert said. “But we just want to make sure we are prepared on the cleaning front and the remote learning front, so that way we have learned and keep going forward in that.”
Hoffert said he wants to make sure the community knows WCS is doing everything necessary in the next school year.
WCS wants to make sure the schools are the cleanest and safest they can be for students going into the new school year, Hoffert said, noting the school corporation realizes there’s going to be a need to do deep cleaning throughout the year, as well as other things. COVID-19 has brought several challenges to the school corporation.
“We’re hoping this is a one-time pandemic,” Hoffert said.
Usually, WCS waits for breaks to do deep cleaning, but in the 2020-21, the school corporation won’t have the ability to wait for breaks to do so.
