The School District 27 (SD 27) board of education approved academic calendars for the next two years at the board’s Feb. 24 regular public meeting.
The calendars, which cover the 2025-2026 and 2026-2027 school years, were distributed for feedback following the board’s Dec. 16, 2024, meeting.
“It’s interesting cause you always get contradictory feedback,” said the district’s superintendent Cheryl Lenardon while presenting the feedback at the Feb. 24 board meeting.
“Some people like this, some people like the opposite.”
Overall, SD 27 received 218 survey responses of which 44 per cent came from parents and 36 per cent came from staff. Of the district’s nearly 4,600 students, 36 responded to the survey. The district also received feedback from executives of the Cariboo Chilcotin Teacher's Association and the International Union of Operating Engineers.
104 survey respondents supported the calendar as it was presented with some providing feedback on the potential scheduling of Professional Development Days (Pro-D Days), while 114 respondents said they would like to see changes to the calendar.
Lenardon reviewed the feedback on Feb. 12 with the district’s education committee which agreed to send the draft calendars as they were for the board’s approval.
In the feedback Lenardon presented, some respondents asked for no changes to scheduled breaks, expressing a desire for breaks not to be changed each year. Others asked for more breaks between January and March, and about 50 respondents wanted to see a fall break.
Lenardon’s report on the committee’s decision to send the calendars for approval explained that adding a fall break would mean the district was not meeting the standard number of instructional days.
Some also requested for the spring break to be separated from Easter break, but the report said breaks would then not align with those in other districts. It also said this would reduce the number of school days.
The report said a typical number of days exceeds 180, and its 2026-2027 calendar counts 179 days. While many requested schools end on the last Friday in June to avoid the calendar reaching into the following week, the report said this would reduce school days to 177 at the most.
There were a number of suggestions around Pro-D Days, with some requesting they not be scheduled near the National Day for Truth and Reconciliation, while others said they liked having it scheduled at that time. Some feedback also expressed a preference for Pro-D Days to be scheduled on Fridays and not Mondays, or vice versa.
“In the end the recommendation of the committee at that meeting was to proceed with recommending to the board the draft calendars as they are,” Lenardon said, adding the Pro-D days may still change as their dates are negotiated with the teachers’ union.
When the calendars were first distributed for feedback, Lenardon explained the district is trying to get ahead of schedule by approving calendars two years in advance to allow staff and families to plan ahead.
