PEORIA, Ill. — The Peoria Public Schools’ Balanced Calendar Committee presented an update on its studies and findings during Monday night’s District 150 Board of Education meeting.
Essentially, a “balanced calendar” is what’s more universally known as “year-round schooling.” The district has been considering adopting the concept since 2017.
Assistant Superintendent of Curriculum Dr. Sandra Wilson said the committee has been broken up into subcommittees, which have spent the last month gathering concerns from various district stakeholders. She said around 120 stakeholders have responded.
“We took those 120 concerns and grouped them into categories, and aligned them with the subcommittees,” she said.
The subcommittees in question are building and grounds, athletics, student achievement, finance, staffing, and community.
A family and staff survey was also distributed to gather general perceptions and overall feelings.
“It was just a broad brushstroke of how are you feeling right now about the calendar, to give us additional ideas we might have missed in the concerns we’d collected up to that point,” she said.
Wilson said the committees have also been examining around 12 studies and published articles from between 1996 and 2015, regarding balanced scheduling.
Input was also gathered from a focus group from Valeska Hinton Early Childhood, as Valeska has already implemented a balanced calendar. Interviews were also conducted with staff from districts outside Peoria that have had the balanced calendar for at least nine years, such as Brownsburg, IN, Rock Island, IL, and the Quad Cities.
Director of Transportation Josh Collins said the committee would be moving into phase two of its process, which will include town hall meetings, community groups, parent-teacher meetings, and another family and staff survey set to be distributed in March.
The next update is scheduled for March 22. Depending on what that update brings, Collins said, Superintendent Dr. Sharon Desmoulin-Kherat could recommend adopting the calendar, meaning the board could vote on the proposal as early as April.
If passed, the new calendar would be implemented for the 2022-2023 school year.
