SchoolMatters Weblog

2006-07 School Year to Start August 21st

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).  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

The King/Queen of School Start Dates

Who is the king/queen of school start dates?  Who decides if we start before Labor Day?  It is the time of year I get constituent emails asking when school will start in August.  Or is it September?!  Schools around the country are wrestling with when to set school start dates.  Many are starting much earlier than Albemarle.

The king is Kings Dominion (the amusement park).  The queen is Mother Nature.  I think they both live in Richmond at the General Assembly. I am not making this up... Virginia has what we call the "Kings Dominion Law" named after the theme park outside Richmond, which requires schools to start AFTER Labor Day (the thinking is that way theme parks will not lose their workforce).

Each year Albemarle County has to pray for snow from Mother Nature and hope the King in Richmond will grant us a waiver to start school in August.  If we get enough snow days (averaged over a number of years), we are eligible for a waiver from this law.  During the past decade, I don't believe we have ever started after Labor Day because Albemarle has always successfully gotten a waiver.

There was a recent attempt (which failed) to kill the law by the General Assembly. An article in the Hampton Roads Daily Press reported:

"A law enacted nearly 20 years ago requires schools to open after Labor Day unless they get a waiver from the board. The statute was informally called the "Kings Dominion law" because it was championed by summertime tourist attractions that rely on teenage workers through Labor Day. According to the state Department of Education, 79 of the state's 132 school divisions had permission to start this academic year earlier, mostly to compensate for days missed because of bad weather."

This year, because we have not had enough snow days, staff are preparing two calendar drafts.  One that has us starting before Labor Day and one after.  If we don't get another couple days of snow, we may be forced to comply with Virginia law and start after Labor Day.  I can tell you the Wheeler Family is not making any vacation plans past August 20th.