By Amy Ta,
Staff Writer
Superintendent Art Cunha announced new changes to the instructional calendar on ParentSquare last month. Starting next school year, the fall semester will start one week earlier on Aug. 16.
“The goal is to make sure our students are afforded the same opportunities as other students around us,” Cunha said. “The goal was two-fold: it was to listen to student voices and to also make sure we are positively contributing to the social-emotional well-being of students.”
Subsequent school years will begin on the second Monday of August for teachers and the following Wednesday for students, ending sometime in late May. This will give the school flexibility to have the first semester end before winter break. It also syncs up the sports schedule with other districts and allows AP teachers more time to teach the material before exams.
“I feel that it’s a good change,” freshman Ashley Tang said. “Students would have to go through winter break stressed out because in the back of their minds they know finals are coming up. So, I’m really glad that they decided to change it. I’m happy that I could feel stress free during my winter break and not have finals in the back of my head.”
Talks of changing the instructional calendar began in late November with the approval in March. The district hoped to move up the start date around 10 years ago, but a majority of teachers voted it down. While the discussions continued afterwards, it never reached voting. Interest in changing the calendar rose again after Cunha read Newsletter Editor Claire Denne’s article, “Extend winter break by one week.”
“It made sense to me,” Cunha said. “The fact that our students don’t have a traditional Winter break where kids get to unwind and come back to a new semester, it just didn’t seem right.”
The district created a contract containing the calendar change to use as a negotiable item with bargaining units, which consisted of classified teams and teachers’ unions. The Temple City Educators Association and the district discussed it as part of a new contract. After negotiations ended, teachers anonymously voted, with around 97% of teachers approving the change.
The instructional calendar change also passed in part due to the efforts of four seniors and the TCEA. The TCEA arranged for Denne, Kianna Le, Joshua Hsu and Noah Shifter to go to the other district schools to speak with staff members about their experiences and struggles with the current instructional calendar.
“We knew that we wanted to leave that legacy for future Temple City students,” Le said. “The issues the calendar was causing us were so detrimental to our high school experience that we didn’t want that happening to future high school students. We willingly did this because this was an important cause for us. I hope all of these changes and issues that us seniors had will be lessened as we try to implement changes that will hopefully benefit the student body.”