Do you have a student in PUSD schools? APT’s Calendar Committee seeks more parent input by April 29 on the 2027-2028 calendar.
Take the survey HERE by April 29.
Parents of students in secondary school especially sought, said APT President Elise Marks on Tuesday.
From APT President Elise Marks:
As you probably know, an instructional calendar for 2026-2027 has been ratified, but the School Board did not approve the calendar teachers put forward for the following year. We’re working very hard to come up with viable alternatives so a 2026-2027 calendar can be available to everyone as soon as possible.
Our Calendar Committee will meet again on Thursday, April 30 to build the best possible calendar options for 2026-2027. The committee needs meaningful input from all stakeholders, including students and parents, about their top priorities and concerns.
Calendar design is subject to many constraints, including the state-mandated number of school days, state-mandated holidays, and required professional development days for teachers. We are also contractually obligated to keep fall and spring semesters of roughly equal length, and we need to accommodate fair final exam schedules (students in the same course hate when some sections get an extra weekend to study rather than having all sections take the exam on the same day), and enable three graduation ceremonies for the two high schools and the middle school.
We also must schedule breaks in such a way as to limit the likelihood that families feel they must pull students out of school to travel (creating absences that lose the district up to a million dollars a year in attendance-based state funding).
Other concerns come into direct conflict with each other. For instance, if we start fall semester too early, we may impact August family vacations and summer camps for students. If we start it too late, we may need to hold fall semester classes as late as December 23, or finish spring semester well into June, which conflicts with the start of many summer programs students wish to attend.
There’s also the question of how compressed the academic calendar is. At the high school, small breaks throughout the year (like an occasional long weekend) give high school students and teachers a little breathing room to catch up with the intense academic workload, including completing and grading large projects and essays, as well as (for seniors) completing college applications and (for their teachers) writing the many recommendation letters that must go with those college applications. However, for parents of elementary students, non-school days create childcare problems, and some elementary parents have expressed a desire for as few non-mandatory non-school days as possible.
No options will ever be perfect, but we want to make sure that any decisions made are based on the best possible data about what stakeholders are most concerned about.
We’re hoping that the new questions on this survey help clarify parents’ priorities.
To do that effectively, we need as many respondents as possible (but only one parent per household).