Our View: deciding to start school on Monday, Jan. 2 cost the
Gilroy Unified School District $90,000 and a measure of
credibility
Call it a $90,000 mistake.
And that’s just the fiscal toll – significant, to be sure – of the Gilroy Unified School District’s decision to hold school on a major federal holiday. Because New Year’s Day fell on a Sunday this year, banks, post offices and other governmet offices on the local, state and federal levels as well as most public school districts observed the holiday on Monday, Jan. 2.
But not Gilroy’s public schools. Instead, GUSD reopened after the holiday break. Predictably, 21 percent of students stayed home, costing the district $90,000 in state average daily attendance funds.
Common sense should have told district administrators that flying in the face of tradition and the majority of the population by ignoring the holiday would be a mistake.
In fact, common sense did tell them that.
“We as a district made a decision to have this (as a school day) and we’re paying the price,” Ascencion Solorsano Middle School Principal Sal Tomasello said. “I think we had an idea that it was going to have an impact.”
But it wasn’t just common sense telling them that it was unwise to hold school on the observed New Year’s holiday. The Santa Clara County Office of Education, which circulates a suggested school district calendar, also advised districts to close on the New Year’s holiday.
Was it just too much bother to fix the calendar, drawn up three years ago? Yes, the district would have had to find another day to make up for having New Year’s Day off. How about these radical ideas: Start the break one day later. Add a day to the end of the
school year. Start the school year one day earlier.
It’s not an impossible task, but it’s one that no one at the district deemed important enough to undertake.
And that cost the district, which, like most public schools in California, is chronically short of funds.
We don’t condone parents who kept their kids home from school to protest the district’s boneheaded calendar decision. That sends the wrong message to students. Roughly 2,100 Gilroy students, minus those who were legitimately absent, were a given a parental lesson in playing hooky.
Roughly 2,100 students lost a day of instruction time, teachers will have to work around having a big chunk of their students behind schedule, and the district’s goal of promoting academic excellence took a hit.
But the district, knowing that most people would expect to have the day off, could have predicted, should have predicted, that its absentee rate would be astronomical.
Next time, let’s hope the district is proactive, uses common sense and heads off eminently avoidable losses like this ahead of time.
