Putting together the annual school calendar is no easy task.
The work is made even harder in Macon County, where administrators do their best to fit the state-mandated number of instructional hours into the timeframe given to them from the North Carolina Legislature while keeping two K-12 schools in mind.
The 2020-2021 calendar for Highlands is now public and the first day of school for students will be Monday, Aug. 24.
“By law we have to provide 1,025 instructional hours minimum and we are not allowed to start instructional days any earlier than the Monday closest to Aug. 26, and we have to be finished no later than the Friday prior to June 11,” Macon County School Superintendent Chris Baldwin said. “We have a calendar committee made up of elementary, middle and high school teachers and they do a great job of making a functional calendar for the students and faculty while staying within the state guidelines.”
Highlands students will be in school 168 total days next year, which equates to 1,063 hours. The final day of school for students will be Friday, May 21, 2021.
“While we are over the minimum number of instructional hours, we are in line with what neighboring counties provide for their students,” Baldwin said. “Because teachers are under contract for 215 workdays each school year, completing the year in 168 days allows us to have additional teacher workdays and allows us to adjust if we do have winter weather cancellations.”
Baldwin noted that Macon County does not qualify for the state’s winter weather waiver, which allows some Western North Carolina school districts to start their school year a week earlier in anticipation of cancellations.
“In order to qualify for the waiver a district must miss eight weather-related days a year for four of the past 10 years,” Baldwin said. “Transylvania and some other nearby counties do qualify, so they get a little additional flexibility in terms of when to start their instructional days, but we do not.”
Baldwin added that the way the calendar falls does present one scheduling quirk – The first semester (79 instructional days) of the 2020-2021 school year will be 10 days shorter than the second (89 instructional days).
“It’s not ideal to have one semester so much shorter than the other, but we do everything we can to ensure that exams are all done in one week and not split before and after a weekend,” Baldwin said. “Sometimes because of that, and the way the holidays fall, we get one semester that is longer.”
Highlands will host a kindergarten orientation day, for all prosepctive kindergarten students, at 10 a.m. on Wednesday, March 11.
The complete 2020-2021 Highlands School calendar can be found online at www.macon.k12.nc.us/resources/calendars.