5 Beverly Saturday School Days To Make Up For Teacher Strike Days Lost
BEVERLY, MA — Beverly students will be required to attend classes for five Saturdays — one each in January, February, March, April and May — as part of a plan to make up the 12 school days lost to last month’s historically long teachers’ strike.
The School Committee voted 4-2 on Wednesday night — with School Committee member and Mayor Michael Cahill not in attendance — to go with a version of the Saturday option that Superintendent Suzanne Charochak presented to fulfill the state requirement of 180 classroom days necessary to be completed before June 30.
With the elimination of the Dec. 23 day off at the start of the holiday vacation and four days during February vacation already added to make up for lost days due to the strike, the Saturday option was chosen ahead of the one that would have eliminated April vacation and one that would have added all seven remaining days to be made up at the end of the school year. Had the School Committee pursued that late-June option, then any snow days prior to April 1 would have had to be “backfilled” as school days during Saturdays or the April break.
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Charochak said she consulted with the Department of Secondary and Education on how to make up the days and was told that remote days and longer school days would not be accepted as make-up days.
Marblehead Superintendent John Robidoux told that district’s School Committee when it was considering how to make up its 11 days missed because of its simultaneous strike last week that DESE told him those means to make up days would not be permitted because allowing them “would incentivize unions to strike because there would be no repercussions.”
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“There’s no wiggle room,” he told the Marblehead School Committee, which is set to vote on its revised school calendar following a school community survey of options next week.
Arguments against simply extending the school included the risk involved in a snowy winter and the relative value of late-June school days compared to those earlier in the academic year. Arguments against giving up April vacation were that it would essentially force students to be in school from Jan. 2 all the way to the end of June without a single extended break.
Charochak said that while students would not individually be punished for absences during the make-up days due to prior family commitments, she noted that the district would need at least 50 percent attendance for any make-up days or be subject to having to schedule yet another one.
“I am gravely concerned about making the 50 percent threshold, although I agree it’s a low threshold,” Charochak said. “Part of me says: ‘Of course, 50 percent of our kids are going to show up and they will all be there.’ But that would be a real challenge to have held a day and not met the threshold. That would be really disheartening for the teachers. That would be disheartening for the students. That would be disheartening for parents.
“So I think we are going to have to make a concerted effort all around to make sure we get our kids in school and our families understand the importance of that.”
The School Committee gave the superintendent’s office discretion to determine which Saturday each month would be the make-up day with a stated goal of having it on the same Saturday — the first or second Saturday e.g. — each of the five months.
The make-up days will also push back graduation with the Saturday option pushing it back less than it would have been had the school year simply been extended to the end of June. The original graduation date had been June 1 with now a date as early as June 8 being a revised option.
The date would have been as late as June 15 if the make-up days were held at the end of June.
(Scott Souza is a Patch field editor covering Beverly, Danvers, Marblehead, Peabody, Salem and Swampscott. He can be reached at [email protected]. X/Twitter: @Scott_Souza.)
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