Broward students get an earlier start date for next school year. Here are the latest details.
South Florida Sun Sentinel | By Scott Travis | January 24, 2024
Broward students will get a shorter summer this year, with the school year starting Aug. 12, the earliest day allowed by state law.
The 2024-25 calendar is designed to help the district finish its first semester by Dec. 20, the last day before students leave for winter break. In recent years, the first semester has lingered into January.
The last day of the school year will be Tuesday, June 3, 2025.
“With the first semester now starting earlier and concluding before the winter break, we believe both students and teachers will have more time to prepare for exams and recharge before the second semester,” Superintendent Peter Licata said.
Palm Beach County also will start the school year Aug. 12, but will end earlier, May 30, 2025, due to fewer holidays within the year. The school year in Miami-Dade County starts Aug. 15 and ends June 5, 2025.
The early start date in Broward — the current school year started Aug. 21 — means students will get a nine-week summer vacation, compared to 10 weeks in recent years.
A divided School Board said no on Tuesday to a proposal preferred by the district’s calendar committee as well as a survey of students, parents and staff, which would have started the school year a week later and ended the first semester in mid-January. The school year also would have ended a week later.
The School Board was initially divided 4-4 on the two proposed calendars. The sticking point wasn’t the start date but whether to convert four early release days — where students get out two hours earlier so teachers can finish grading — into full days.
Without the extra hours of two of those days, the district couldn’t finish the first semester in December and still meet the minimum required instructional time, district officials said.
A change in the early release days must be negotiated with the Broward Teachers Union, and union leaders had been reluctant to discuss the issue.
“This is not something that the board can unilaterally impose on the teaching staff, because there is a contract,” Marylin Batista, the district’s general counsel, told the School Board on Tuesday. “If you wish to change, there needs to be negotiation with the other party.”
But some School Board members refused to budge.
“We are communicating to our community that we are a halfway school system when we have half days,” Board member Allen Zeman said. “And we are not halfway. We don’t want to be partially educating students. We want to fully educate them.”
Before Tuesday’s meeting ended, Union President Anna Fusco agreed to negotiate changing the two early release days in the fall semester to full instructional days. All early release days in the second semester will remain the same.
“We’re always willing to come back to the table to negotiate, but there needs to be an understanding that those early release days were put in place so teachers and all support staff could get their grades done in the time frame to meet report cards,” Fusco said. “There needs to be a discussion of when that can happen.”
The new calendar keeps the weeklong Thanksgiving break. It will be from Nov. 25 to Nov. 29. Spring break will be March 24 to March 28.
