Crawford County students are getting two more weeks of summer vacation.
The school board approved cutting the school year to 160 days Tuesday night, pushing the first day of school back to Tuesday, Sept. 3.
School board member Lee Sanders said this year’s school calendar will have 15 fewer days than last year’s, which had 175. Georgia law mandates instructional hours instead of days in school, and the Department of Education defines a school year as “180 days or the equivalent.”
Matt Cardoza, director of communications at Georgia Department of Education, said these types of changes to school calendars to cut operation costs are common these days. School districts with strains on their budget can save money on things such as electricity and buses with each day they remove from the calendar.
“It’s not unusual with these really tough times and declining budgets,” he said.
Cardoza said the majority of schools in Georgia actually have fewer than 180 days in their school years, and many of them have been cutting days in the past several years.
In fact, in the 2012-13 academic year, data from the Department of Education shows that just 31 percent of Georgia public school districts had 180 days of instruction. The majority, 56 percent, had 170 to179 days. Just 10 percent of school districts operated fewer than 170 days, the lowest being 144 days of instruction in Chattooga County in north Georgia.
via Crawford County cuts school year to 160 days | Education | Macon.com.
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