Last night, the Board of Education voted to postpone the start of school for the 2012-2013 school year by a week and a half, until Aug. 27, which pushes the end date to June 4. We realize that there is no perfect calendar to the school year, and there are strong arguments both for starting earlier and starting later.

(While many preferred maintaining the previously planned start date of Aug. 16), an Aug. 27 start date allows us to have seven fewer days of school in mid-August heat, still have our semester end before winter break, and end school only a couple of days into June.

One point that many parents emphasized in community conversations: the school year is too short. Many community members talked about the need to move past the outdated nine-month calendar, which was based more on the needs of an agrarian society than the learning needs of today’s kids and preparing them for the 21st century.

We share those concerns and are committed to looking for ways to extend both the length of the school day and the school year. Extending the school year requires additional funding, which is very challenging in this brutal cycle of state budget- cutting. There is, however, a clear need to work toward a good solution – to explore resource options for extending the school year to meet the learning needs of our students.

These conversations also emphasized the need for improvements to our plans for days of extreme heat, given how unpredictable Colorado weather is and that those days can happen in May, June, August, or September. That includes a discussion of the possibilities of “heat days” or early-release schedules for the roughly half of our schools that don’t have air conditioning, as well as a look at possible facility upgrades at those schools and the viability of funding them.

I look forward to your continued feedback and to working with the entire community on these issues.