Multimedia Reporting (Kuhr-Musser)

On February 13 The Lawrence Board of Education unanimously approved the permanent use of a trimester system for elementary students.
The new calendar will take effect during the 2006-07 school year and affect about 5,000 elementary students in 15 schools.
Lawrence USD 497 joins Hutchison USD 308 as the only other school district in Kansas to use the trimester system.
Many schools nationwide in states such as California, Colorado and Massachusetts have adopted similar schedules for students.
Dr. Tom Christie, Executive Director of Educational Programming, solicited input from several teachers before submitting a proposal to the school board and surprisingly received little opposition from teachers.
Christie said teachers welcomed the idea because it allowed them to “focus extra time on working with students” and it better allows them to address strengths and weaknesses of individual students.
Under the old quarter system, elementary teachers would be forced to grade students after only 8 weeks instruction. With the new trimester system, teachers grade students after 11 weeks of instruction.
Dr. Sandee Crowther, Executive Director of Planning and Program Improvement and head of the Calendar Committee in charge of the switch said many teachers she spoke with “felt like they didn’t know the students” because thety had to grade them so quickly into the school year.
Besides longer grading periods, other advantages of the program are a reduction in paperwork and less recording and reporting time for teachers.
The approval of the new schedule was the result of two years work solving challenges presented by the new plan.
In September 2004 a committee was commissioned to study the possible implementation of trimesters for elementary students.
After seven months deliberation, the committee gave its recommendations to a calendar committee who then attempted to fit the trimester program into the yearly schedule.
Because only elementary schools are effected by the change, the calendar committee had to be sure the elementary schedule coincided with middle and high school calendars to accommodate vacation times.
Initially, the calendar committee found it would cost an additional $32,000 to operate buses for the elementary schools because days did not correlate enough with middle or high school days.
Crowther said this initial finding made the changes impossible.
For the past seven years, declining enrollment in the Lawrence Public School District has caused budget cuts across the board. There was simply no money to pay for the additional bus service required.
Because of this, the calendar committee forced to redesign the schedule to better coincide with middle and high school schedules and avoid the extra $32,000 bussing cost.
Crowther says under the new schedule, elementary students will still attend school for the 186 six hour days mandated by state law.
With the schedule firmly in place, one problem still needed to be addressed.
Evaluations given by the district now have to be adapted to fit into the new schedule.
Christie says the district is evaluating how they are currently evaluating students, and will have to figure out how to institute the required stated, local, and normed assessment the district is required to administer.
Chrisite says the district is reworking its method for evaluating elementary students and is currently working to solve the problem in time for the 2006-07 school year.