[StonyPointEagle] School starts August 21st, thanks to 3 students in Charlottesville!

[Price, Ronnie (Ron)]

The Albemarle County School Board approved the 2006-07 school calendar
tonight
which has a starting date of Monday, August 21, 2006.

Interestingly, if you support our starting school before Labor Day, you
can thank three students from the City of Charlottesville.  I'll come
back to them in a moment...

I have spoken previously about the practice of annually applying for a
pre-Labor Day waiver from the VA Department of Education (DOE) because
of the Kings Dominion Law which says, in the Old Dominion, school starts
after the amusement parks have declared Summer is over (See: The
King/Queen of School Start Dates, 
http://schoolmatters.typepad.com/my_weblog/2006/02/the_kingqueen_o.html)
.  For the past 10 years, we have gotten early start waivers approved
because of our track record with bad weather.  Lots of snow days leads
to calendar flexibility.   Seventy-nine of the state's 132 school
divisions received waivers this year.  However, our luck ran out on snow
days this year, so we had to apply for a waiver under a provision
related to school systems in cooperative programs.  If one of your
partners has bad luck with weather, you can piggy back off their waiver
request. 

Well, Albemarle thought we had it made because we participate in the
Piedmont Regional Education Program (PREP), a regional program for
special education services.  Including Albemarle, there are 11 school
divisions in PREP.  Would you believe VA DOE told us we had to have at
least one student at EVERY ONE of our 25 schools involved in PREP to
qualify for the cooperative program waiver!  Murray HS has no students
receiving services from PREP.  So we were 24 out of 25 schools towards
our waiver request.  

THEN, staff were able to identify ANOTHER connection back to one of our
PREP partners, the City of Charlottesville.  Thanks to three City
students enrolled in the County's charter school, Murray High School, we
were able to convince the VA DOE that we should be eligible for the
waiver and thus be able to decide, on our own, the start date for
Albemarle County Public Schools.  

So... that is why I was able to cast my vote for a school calendar
tonight.  Thank you Charlottesville.

Brian Wheeler

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Brian Wheeler
bwheeler at albemarlematters.com <mailto:bwheeler at albemarlematters.com> 
http://www.wheeleronboard.com <http://www.wheeleronboard.com/> 

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