School Starts Early Again this Year in Urbandale, but 2013-14 Could be Last Year for Waiver

School starts Aug. 19 in Urbandale, but this might be the last year Iowa school districts are allowed early starts, contrary to a state law that puts the first day of school no earlier than the calendar week that includes Sept. 1.

Iowa’s State Board of Education is taking up the contentious start-date issue at a meeting Thursday at 9 a.m. at the Grimes State Office Building. Public comment will be allowed.

Whatever members decide won’t affect this school year, but the Iowa Department of Education waiver allowing mid- to late-August start dates likely won’t be as easy to obtain as in the past.

Academic Hardship "May Be the Button We Push"

If the state school board aligns school dates with state law, which Urbandale Superintendent Doug Stilwell thinks is members’ intent, his district would have to prove a financial or academic hardship to start earlier than the law prescribes.

Academic hardship “may be the button we push when we submit our application for a waiver,” Stilwell said.

Urbandale officials think ending the first semester and scheduling tests before students head home for a two-week winter break is a best practice that should be preserved under local control.

“That gives them a better chance to do well on their exams,” Stilwell said.”Those semester tests impact over 1,000 children at the high school and we want to be sensitive and give kids the best opportunity to do as well as they can.”

Even starting school one week later would disrupt a calendar that aligns the end of the semester with the beginning of winter break.

DISCUSS: Should local school districts like Urbandale have local control over their school calendars, or should the State Board of Education decide? Tell us what you think in the comments below.

State law requires that schools start after Sept. 1, but the all but seven Iowa’s 350 school districts received the waiver for the 2012-13 school year, the Des Moines Register reported.

That effectively renders the code moot. Stilwell thinks the state school board is taking up the issue for the right reasons — “trying to do is abide by what the current law says” — but he wants to make sure decisions are in the best interests of student learning.

“Bottom line,” he said, “everyone does want what’s best for the state of Iowa.”

Local Control Concerns

But the state school board’s consideration of the issue raises “some concern about what is appropriate local control and appropriate state control,” said Stilwell, pointing out the district calendar is approved by the Urbandale school board after gathering input from teachers, parents and students.

Stilwell said Urbandale officials aren’t insensitive to the tourism industry’s claims that early starts cut into their profits, the availability of a teen work force and family vacation time.

“From the state’s perspective, I know their side is that we don’t want to deter from tourism, whether the Iowa Great Lakes or the State Fair,” the superintendent said. “We want to be good neighbors.

“Businesses foot a chunk of the bill. I don’t want to say that I don’t consider all of that, but I’ve not seen any data that shows how much revenue is gained or lost by the earlier start date.”

But the argument for a later should start “should be an educational argument and what’s in the best interest of our schools to do the best they can throughout the entirety of the school year,” he said.

He said that if supporters of the later start date could produce “a ton of research tha says that if school starts after September, kids will perform better, I would … be supportive of it,” he said.

Last spring, the Urbandale school board decided on the Aug. 19 school start date as a fair compromise that respects the Iowa State Fair’s 2013 calendar (Aug. 8-18) and still ends the semester before winter break.

Calendars are a complicated labyrinth that are already difficult to arrange, and the state school board has been quiet on the issue of whether fall activities such as football, volleyball and cross country involving thousands of Iowa students start when school starts or about a week earlier, Stilwell said.

A later start date would not only complicate athletic and other activity schedules, but it could limit the ability of students to enroll in dual credit courses offered by Des Moines Area Community College, “which means less out of their pockets and their parents pockets”  for their college educations.

“We need to align with their calendars,” Stilwell said