Schools for Tomorrow Blog

The state’s largest school district – Jefferson County – opens its doors to students today. On August 12, you say? Yes, indeed. It appears that Jeffco is helping to push the trend of earlier and earlier starts to the school year.

In a sort of non-binding way, Colorado Revised Statutes § 22-33-102 defines the “academic year” as “beginning about the first week in September.” Right now, with the Olympics crowding the airwaves and the Democratic National Convention coming to town immediately thereafter, the first week in September seems like quite a long time from now.

Once upon a time, it was more the norm for the public schools to kick off the year right after Labor Day. Much of this of course stems from our nation’s agrarian roots and the need to comport with planting and harvesting schedules on the family farm. So by bringing up the fact that Jeffco Schools start…

I was attending one of the seemingly hundreds of educational fact finding committee meetings (if someone did a meta-analysis of the reports put out by these well-intentioned powerless groups—think P-16 Council, P-20 Council, Great Education Colorado — I predict they would all say the same thing: something needs to change!), and a business owner asked why teachers wanted more money.

“Don’t teachers work for only 10 months out of the year? If you look at the pay for 10 months and not 12 months, it’s not that bad.”

To a certain extent, this  is a valid argument. But  looking at pay by the hour versus the year tells a different story. Let’s ay the average worker puts in 50 weeks a year, with two weeks off for vacation.  At 40 hours a week times 50 weeks, that’s 2,000 hours. Now let’s look at a teacher’s hourly work week. This is…