Balanced calendar is not a dead issue

Some of the feedback we have gotten from supporters in recent days indicates that many of those who opposed the balanced calendar with is for the last couple of months think that the calendar is a now dead issue and the campaign is now ended. After all, the School Board unanimously voted on Jan. 17 to adopt a traditional calendar for 2006-2007, didn't it?

Yes, it did. But the balanced calendar merely hibernates. It is not deceased.

At the Jan. 17 meeting, Board member Barry Watkins, the balanced calendar's greatest advocate, stated after the vote that he intended to raise the balanced calendar again for the 2007-2008 school year. Another Board member has told several of us that he intends to keep pushing for year-round school with the next school year.

There is broad agreement across the Board to set the 07-08 calendar before school is dismissed this May, probably much earlier than that. We expect to see again a push for the balanced calendar by Central Office to some degree as well.

We expect the calendar push for 07-08 by year-round calendar advocates will include one or both of the following:

• Place one to three high school "clusters" on a year-round calendar, probably one or all of Fairview, Page and Independence. Barry Watkins is already pushing for that to happen. He asked Director Sharber on Jan. 17 to provide him with cost data and has advised his constituents in electoral district 9 of that fact not long after the Jan. 17 meeting.
  
• "Calendar creep," which we covered here. Basically, it is a tactic by which the summer is shortened by a day or two here, a day or two there, until after a few years we discover that we've got a year-round calendar and wonder how it happened. It's the "boil a frog" technique or, as we wrote before, giving a mouse a cookie.

"Eternal vigilance," wrote Thomas Jefferson, " is the price of freedom." So, as we already have pointed out, the Citizens Calendar Committee remains in business.

The 2007-2008 calendar will be an agenda item at the Board's Feb. 9 work session. We'll post more information as the date draws nearer.