10
COVER STORY
• AUGUST 2025
The Current
despite the changes, Parker said. School “This is just taking the 180 days and redistributing them,” he said. Districts align The district put together a committee that included staff, Schedules parents and community members to consider the change. The group met eight times and also surveyed and Cell parents and students to get their input. “It was a very detailed Phones process,” Parker said. “We pulled research. We had speakers come and policies give us information.” By Nina Culver
Current contributor
For the first time in 20 years, all three Spokane Valley area school districts will be starting at the same time and following roughly the same schedule throughout the school year. This year both the Central Valley School District and the West Valley School District have announced modifications to their school calendar, starting back in the classroom before Labor Day and adding a week-long midwinter break in February, plus other scattered days off. These changes match the calendar the East Valley School District has been following for the last 20 years. Central Valley Superintendent John Parker said Central Valley started considering changes to its calendar two years ago, when the state started encouraging school districts to embrace a more balanced schedule. Each school will still have the traditional 180 days of instruction
Parker anticipates that the earlier start date will be the most impactful change, with classes for most students starting on Aug. 27. “That was a significant shift,” he said. Schools are closed for Veterans Day, which falls on a Tuesday this year. The district will not have classes the day before, on November 10, to create a four-day weekend for staff and students. Winter break remains the same, but the district added four days off to the week of President’s Day in February, giving everyone a week-long mid-winter break. Other no school days have been added to the schedule to create occasional three-day weekends. The schedule committee felt the community would appreciate those breaks, Parker said. “I think it was pretty smart work,” he said. West Valley started looking at a schedule change around the same time, said Superintendent Kyle Rydell. “We modeled it after what
Photo by Nina Culver East Valley High School Booster Club partnered with Shaw Contracting and Alliance Flooring to install new flooring in the high school entryway. East Valley has done for 20 plus years,” he said. “Now East Valley, Central Valley and West Valley are going to have identical calendars. It’s creating some consistency.” District staff voted in favor of the new schedule, Rydell, citing the need for more breaks. “They see some fatigue not only in their students, but among themselves," he said. "Our calendar has remained unchanged since the 1970's and it was created around the farm seasons." Separate from the calendar work, Central Valley decided to change
the way they handle parent-teacher conferences in elementary schools. Previously, the district had 11 half school days on the calendar for conferences. That was disruptive to the school day schedule and meant that students couldn’t do some of their usual activities, Parker said, and the district has considered changing it for some time. Switching the school calendar was the perfect opportunity to make that change as well, he said. This year, the district will switch to having five full days off for conferences, Oct 22-24 and Feb. 5-6. “We felt five full days of being gone made more sense than 11 half days,” Parker said. “We felt it was a good opportunity to weave everything in all at once.” West Valley is also working to expand a pilot before and after school program at Ness Elementary operated by the Boys and Girls Club of Spokane County. It operated at the school last year and also ran during the summer at Ness for students throughout the district. Currently the district is considering how to transport students from other schools to the program, Rydell said. “We just have the space at Ness to do it,” he said. “We’re trying to figure out how to expand it.”
Photo by Nina Culver, Selkirk Middle School
Perhaps the biggest change in West Valley this school year is bringing kindergarten students back to the elementary schools. The district lost its lease for the building that housed the district’s preschool program, which meant moving those