BROOKINGS – The Brookings School Board approved its 2018-2019 and 2019-2020 school calendars Feb. 12, outlining such dates as holidays, staff development days and parent/teacher conferences, and they approved a plan to begin studying and surveying for later school start times.

As listed in the calendar provided in the agenda packet, the first day of the 2018-2019 school year is set to be Aug. 24, and the last day of the school year is May 21 with a noon dismissal. High school graduation is scheduled for May 26, 2019.

There will be 172 classroom days for that school year for the students and 178 days for teachers.

As stated during the school board meeting, school start times are going to remain the same for 2018-2019: 8:15 a.m. for Brookings High School, Mickelson Middle School, Camelot Intermediate, and 8:20 for the three elementary schools.

Also from the calendar in the agenda packet, students will start the 2019-2020 school year on Aug. 23, 2019, and also will have 172 classroom days. The last day of school will be May 19, 2020, also with a noon dismissal.

High school graduation will be May 24, 2020.

The start times for the 2019-2020 school year are also to remain as is – at least for now. The school board passed an action plan on assessing school start times, potentially for the 2019-2020 school year. The plan sets February 2019 as the target completion and decision date.

In previous school board meetings, the school board had discussed having later start times for at least the elementary schools, but no action has taken place on that yet.

As part of the approved plan provided in the agenda packet, there will be extensive studying and analyzing before anything is brought to the school board. In the next year, this means surveying students, parents, businesses and community groups, hosting focus groups with local health care professionals, research on community impact, among other things.

Things such as a proposed altered start time and whether it would be implemented just at the elementary schools or more would be determined in the course of this work, said Brookings School District Superintendent Klint Willert.

Then, based on the collected data, the school board can decide whether to abandon the idea, adapt the proposed plan based on feedback or adopt the changes as would be presented to the board. 

As called for in the provided plan, analysis would continue after any implementation to ensure it’s making the intended impact. This means reviewing input from parents, businesses and community organizations such as the Boys & Girls Club and GAP after changes have been made.

If any changes to start times are implemented, they’d monitor multiple statistic points to see if there are any improvements. Those assessment points include student attendance, student tardiness, a student survey on satisfaction, a staff survey on satisfaction, a parent survey on satisfaction, anecdotal observations of student behaviors and activities schedule impacts.

The goal, as stated in the plan, is to improve student wellness and wellbeing, particularly among adolescents, as identified in Centers for Disease Control and Prevention data, and to impact positively student attendance and student achievement.

Contact Eric Sandbulte at esandbulte@brookingsregister.com.