Last night, the District 58 Board of Education approved a recommendation to reschedule the canceled Nov. 26 Teacher Inservice Day to Friday, Feb. 15 and to use an emergency day at the end of the school year to make up the school attendance day. As you recall, the original Teacher Inservice Day was canceled due to inclement weather. Please note these changes on your calendar: Friday, Feb. 15 will be a non-student attendance day, and Thursday, June 6 will be a student attendance day.
District 58 recognizes that high-quality professional learning experiences are incredibly important not only to our teachers, but also for our students. The canceled Nov. 26 Teacher Inservice Day agenda included valuable and needed learning experiences related to new science curriculum, technology, the new English-language arts curriculum resources, social-emotional learning and more. We designed the agenda with teacher feedback, and we believe teachers can use these learning experiences to immediately enhance their classroom instruction.
When deciding how best to make up this Teacher Inservice Day, our team considered:
What’s best for students?: We recognize that the Teacher Inservice Day imparts valuable knowledge that our teachers can immediately use to enhance their classroom instruction. Instead of rescheduling this Teacher Inservice Day to the end of the school year, we believed it would be more impactful to provide it to teachers during the school year, so students can immediately reap the benefits. In addition, using one of our emergency days at the end of the school year ensures that student instructional time is not lost as we make up this inservice day.
What’s best for staff?: We respect our teacher and staff contracts, so we did not want to reschedule the Teacher Inservice Day on a weekend or scheduled holiday. Parents, teachers and community members have advocated strongly to ensure teachers receive adequate and thorough training each year. The timing of this day allows us to maintain the sequence of teacher learning and maintain our commitment to providing that training.
What’s best for parents?: We recognize that making a calendar change will impact parent schedules, requiring parents to arrange child care for Feb. 15 and to cancel child care for June 6. To minimize this inconvenience, we are providing advance notice of the Feb. 15 non-student attendance day in hopes of giving parents two months to make this arrangement.
District 58 realizes that this calendar change may be an inconvenience for parents. Our administrative team thoughtfully considered how best to provide these critical learning opportunities to our staff, while creating the least disruption to our families. We sincerely appreciate your cooperation and thank you for supporting the value of teacher professional development and its benefit for students. We are proud to partner with parents on our students’ continued educational journey!