School districts may join Purdue in calendar shift

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WEST LAFAYETTE (AP) — Public school districts near Purdue University that have traditionally sought to align their calendars with the university’s may soon question whether to follow Purdue in shifting to a year-round academic calendar.

Purdue announced Jan. 13 that it would move to a trimester calendar by 2020, breaking up the academic year into three 13-week blocks and providing a larger lineup of summer courses. The shift, which would increase Purdue’s revenue, is part of a larger plan to deal with declining state aid.

Tippecanoe County school officials say it is too soon to tell if they’ll match Purdue’s move. Parents of many schoolchildren in those districts hold university jobs, and having similar calendars makes it easier to schedule vacations.

“We can’t say what’s going to happen,” said West Lafayette Community Schools board member Alan Karpick. “But certainly we have the influence of so many kids and so many parents involved with the university. We have to look at ways to make that work.”

In contrast to a traditional calendar, where summer vacation usually stretches from June to August, a balanced calendar includes spring, winter and fall breaks of about 15 days, plus a 30-day summer break. The traditional two-semester calendar has four blocks of classes 45 days in length.

At least one local school board has already broached the subject. During a Tippecanoe School Corp. work session on the day of Purdue’s announcement, board members seemed cold to the idea.

School board member Randy Bond said there isn’t much comparison between the circumstances of Purdue’s calendar change and the possibility of it for local school districts.

“(Purdue’s) main motivation is to generate new revenue,” Bond said. “That’s not going to work for K-12 education. We can’t stretch our calendar out and get more money out of that.”

West Lafayette parent Amy Austin said she would like the district to adopt a year-round calendar in part because it would result in more frequent but shorter vacations.

“Children would retain information better from year to year if they didn’t have a 12-week break,” she said.

In the late 1990s, a handful of Lafayette School Corp. schools, including Linnwood Elementary, piloted a year-round calendar. Tippecanoe School Corp. assistant superintendent Susan DeLong, who was then Linnwood’s principal, said the program worked well.

But DeLong said many parents didn’t like having some children out of school at different times than other children. She said it’s too early to know whether the district will discuss revisiting the pilot project in light of Purdue’s planned move.

“Our educational needs really have to drive our calendar,” DeLong said.

Karen White, whose children attend Tippecanoe School Corp. schools, said she would be in favor of a year-round calendar, but that implementing the change would be problematic.

“I think there are a lot of traditionally minded people that have all these summer programs and vacations, and the whole budgetary system for the schools is designed on this extended period of time” over the summer, she said.

The state Senate filed legislation this year that would require school corporations to conduct referendums before moving to a balanced calendar, but that bill has not yet had a hearing.

Scott Hanback, superintendent of Tippecanoe School Corp., said that in the wake of Purdue’s change — a process that will unfold over several years — districts’ discussion of whether to follow that shift is likely to increase in the years ahead.

“It’s a local decision, a community decision with a lot of factors and variables,” he said.