To Break or Not to Break? That is the Question Facing St. Michael-Albertville Schools

If given the choice, would you prefer to have a full week of spring break during the school year and get out one week later, or would you rather plow through without one and end earlier? Don’t forget to consider all the factors: what’s best for students and student achievement at the top, but also considering what families and teachers prefer or how the school year’s ending date could affect other goings-on in the local area.

Are you stumped yet? Welcome to the club: that’s exactly how St. Michael-Albertville’s administrators are feeling.

Last Monday’s school board meeting focused heavily on this contentious issue, and opinion swung wildly among school board members as Superintendent Dr. Marcia Ziegler presented the two final calendar options they are considering. Each option schedules their start day on the usual day after Labor Day, which will be Sept. 6.

However, one option has a shorter mid-winter break over President’s Day, just as they have this year, and has June 1 as the last day of school. Option two inserts a weeklong spring break into the schedule the week of March 19 instead of the shorter mid-winter break, but school will be in session until June 8 as a result.

Ziegler said many parents have been asking to have the standard spring break in March, and she wants to try and accommodate those requests. It has been several years since they included a spring break, Ziegler said, mostly because of late Labor Days.

Board members agree that this is a popular concern they hear about; board chair Doug Birk even said a restaurant full of residents at the St. Michael Dairy Queen once came forward to question him about this perceived "lack of a break." However, a June 8 ending would mean a June 8 graduation date, and this would conflict with Albertville’s Friendly City Days, which always runs the second full weekend in June.

That did not sit well with board members Drew Scherber and Jeanne Holland, who said this would make it harder to find enough volunteers for both the all-night grad party and the town festival, in addition to traffic concerns and a disappointment among those who cannot support the city events as a result.

“All I’m going to say is that you will be hearing from a lot of Albertville people if we schedule graduation over Friendly City Days,” Scherber said.

The March break would also spell difficulty for the district’s students in the Wright Technical program, since most other participating schools are currently leaning toward a spring break during the first week in April. Ziegler said that such a break doesn’t make sense for STMA’s trimester system; they wanted to go with mid-March because that would be a clean break between trimesters and thus made the most academic sense for students.

A couple board members, Birk and co-chair Gayle Weber, tossed around the idea of doing an informal poll of parents to get their opinion, an idea board member Carol Steffens vehemently opposed, saying it was an administrative decision and that’s where it should remain. Ultimately, they all agreed that the poll would likely reveal a mixed bag of opinions, leaving roughly half of the people unhappy with the final result anyway.

“If we went out and surveyed, I can almost guarantee that we would almost get a 50/50,” Ziegler said, adding that on years with a spring break she gets calls from parents who are frustrated with needing to find childcare for a whole week. “There are people on both sides of any placement of time off on a calendar. We just try to make one work where we feel it fits best academically.”