Your HISD student will be back in school before you know it.
Houston ISD is poised to begin the upcoming school year more than two weeks earlier than usual after the Board of Managers voted last week to make HISD a District of Innovation, exempting it from several state laws including those around school start dates.
Superintendent Mike Miles wrote last week in a message to HISD families that the district would seek to start the 2024-2025 school year between Aug. 7 and Aug. 14, both of which fall on Wednesdays. If students were to start school on a Monday, that would make the first day of school Aug. 12, over two weeks earlier than this year’s start date of Aug. 28.
Teachers, who usually return to school two weeks before their students, would likely report to work at the end of July.
“This is an important step in our overall effort to ensure every student has a high-quality education and graduates prepared for the modern workplace and world,” Miles said of the board’s vote to adopt District of Innovation status. “Research indicates that students benefit from more time in school.”
The district plans to present its proposed academic calendar for the upcoming school year at the Board of Managers’ monthly meeting in February, spokesman Joseph Sam said. Beginning next year, HISD plans to have students receive at least 180 days of classroom instruction, compared to the district’s previous standard of 172 days.
See here for the background. There are plenty of reasons to be concerned about HISD, and reasons to worry about the District of Innovation designation, but this is not one of them. I say that as an HISD parent whose high school daughter is absolutely going to complain about her shorter vacation. Just going by the “first day of school” pictures I see posted on Facebook every August, HISD has definitely been an outlier in its start date. This is another one of those things that I hope will help, but at least with this one it’s easy enough to see the connection.