A minimum day is a shorter school day that allows schools to meet the required amount of instructional minutes per week. It can provide benefits for teachers and students, but schools must calculate the required minutes correctly to avoid losing state support. Some parents and students may not like the change in routine. Final planning days are different from minimum days and allow for comprehensive exams.
A minimum day is a shorter day that is often part of many schools’ school weeks. Shortening a school day is typically done because schools are regulated by their districts and states to adhere to a certain amount of instructional minutes per week. This could leave the possibility for many schools to reduce hours in a single day and still meet that average.
There may be some benefits to having a minimum day for students, staff and faculty. Teachers can use the extra time to meet parents, attend staff meetings, or meet students. Students can take advantage of this model by interacting more closely with people who are not in their own class, with whom they may still be pursuing collaborative work. Alternatively, many may simply go home or go to after-school assistance programs and complete their homework sooner.
School districts can vary on how much time is cut out of the day to make it “minimal.” It all depends on the length of the minutes of the rest of the school days and can also depend on the school grades. High school might have shorter instructional minute requirements than grammar schools, for example.
Calculation on this issue is extremely important. Failure to properly count the required minutes could mean schools would run out of instructional hours they need to meet over the course of a year. One such event occurred in San Bernardino County, California in 2009. Because the district failed to correctly calculate the minimum day minutes, schoolchildren are spending 34 extra days in the classroom from early summer to August, just a few weeks before school started again. The district, while sorry for the mistake, was in trouble because failure to meet total instructional minutes and days would have resulted in huge reductions in state support for each school.
Not all people are fans of idling day. Parents who arrange their own pick-up times for their children once a week may find it difficult to need a different arrangement for just one day each week. Children may object to their parents in this regard, as any reduction in school hours, usually by an hour or so, can be seen as a blessing and not a curse. Some propose ending the minimum daily schedule and reducing instruction days instead. However, just as there are minimum hour requirements per school week, there are also minimum day requirements per school year, so this arrangement isn’t always feasible.
The minimum day is usually considered different from the final planning days. As students tend to enter middle and high school, they may have two or three days of final exams at the end of each semester. This allows teachers to provide more comprehensive tests that take more time for students to complete.
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