Yes. Even on a shortened schedule, these days count toward the 180 days of school required by the state. We will still be teaching and learning on these days.

We continue to work closely with local childcare providers and organizations like Parks & Rec to ensure families have support on these release days. Boys & Girls Club operates out of Ordway, xalilc, and Sakai, serving Blakely and Odyssey students out of these buildings as well. We will also ensure that scholarship opportunities through various entities (BCF, Helpline House, PTOs) remain available for confidential access through our counselors and/or administrators.

No. Under state law, a district can only receive one 5-day waiver, either for conferences or professional development. If we utilize the 5-day waiver for professional development, we cannot take any more full-day release days to hold conferences.

No. We cannot require staff to stay for extra time, and we cannot afford to pay staff for extra time. It costs between $11,000–$22,000 per hour to compensate our entire certificated staff, depending on the rate of pay.

No, that is not an effective model for professional development. This would mean our staff would have absolutely zero minutes devoted to professional learning or collaborative work from August until June.

No. Not only would this push our school year to end later in June, but we would also have to extend our employee contracts by 5 days and compensate them for 5 additional days, which we cannot afford.

We have received this feedback from staff members, students and community members. We will be discussing this at the bargaining table with our certificated labor partners the week of May 4th, 2026.

We currently have K-6 conferences three full days prior to mid-winter break, and do not think that there will be a drastic change in attendance between these models.

While we understand that the current model may work for some, there are specific areas where it is not working: 

• Staff lacked sufficient sustained time to collaborate on key areas of need: calibration in instructional practices, curriculum, assessments and grading. 
  • An inconsistent weekly schedule made it difficult for our intervention, highly capable and special education staff to create a consistent schedule for our students accessing these services-this is particularly true at the K-4 level.
• We are not able to comply with our Collective Bargaining Agreement at the K-6 level for planning time. In order to be in compliance, we would need to add costly specialist staffing, which is not the best use of resources for our students and would necessitate reductions elsewhere, and also make it difficult (if not impossible) for us to address compensation needs for our employees. 
• Our K-4 counselors are currently a part of the specialist rotation one day per week, making it difficult for them to be responsive to acute student needs that arise, and limits their ability to hold groups that support students going through specific situations (i.e. grief, changing families  or new students needing to make friends, etc)

Yes, we will still run school buses on half-days.

Yes, we will provide grab and go lunch on half-days.

That is a specific question for child-care providers, but BISD will offer a grab and go lunch option.

We are not able to increase our number of full release days beyond 5 due to state law mandating the number of days attended with the exception of a 5 day waiver for conferences or Professional Development.

As part of the basic education requirements in Washington state, each local education agency (LEA) must make a minimum of 180 school days available to students each school year. LEAs must also provide at least 1,000 annual instructional hours to students in kindergarten through 8th grade, and at least 1,080 annual instructional hours to students in grades 9–12 (a district-wide average of at least 1,027 hours in grades 1–12). 

We would currently meet this requirement and would gain an average of 7 instructional hours in this new calendar.

Our current calendar also receives a 5 days waiver for the purpose of conferences. This new calendar will also have a 5 day waiver, for the purpose of Professional Development instead of conferences.

I understand this perspective, but it is cost prohibitive to add days to our calendar because that then constitutes additional work days for our staff members.