Seguin ISD Superintendent shares more insight into next year’s school calendar

Seguin, TX, USA / Seguin Today

Darren Dunn

(Seguin) — Now that the list of calendar changes has been outlined, Seguin ISD’s top administrator is diving even deeper into why it was so important that they see this new intercession calendar through.

Seguin ISD Superintendent Dr. Matthew Gutierrez says change like this can be hard, but he says it’s important that they take these steps to make sure that they provide quality instruction for each student.
“The purpose of adding these intercession days is to address the academic gaps that exist and unfinished learning. Many of our students have not been in our schools this entire school year. All of our students weren’t in school a year ago for the time after Spring Break and so, there’s a significant need to do something that is innovative and creative and out of the book to be able to work with students and get them on level as much as we can and one way to go about this is the intercession calendar and utilizing those days to bring in identified students and to tap into our teachers who are very talented at growing students and in placing our students in a very small intimate environment so that we can set them up for success,” said Gutierrez.

Dr. Gutierrez says the decision to move forward with this new academic calendar is not only the result of thoughtful consideration by the district, but it’s also supported by the available data and research on this issue.

“The Texas Education Agency just put out some data. They had hundreds of school districts that have participated in beginning of the year assessments and so what it showed is that the average student in Texas lost 5.7 months of learning and the trends are even more alarming for students of color and of course in Seguin, most of our students are of color, most of our students are in free and reduced lunches. So, what we are going to do in the upcoming year is utilize that time to really address the unfinished learning and academic gaps and with the hopes of looking — at the following year — to look at those 10 days that we were initially looking at and so we want to make sure that we set it up well – that we get our students and teachers accustomed to this – that our teachers have the opportunity to be successful providing intervention so that we can look like more districts who are going to intercession with the two weeks or three weeks,” said Gutierrez.

There were indeed a few parents who initially raised some concerns about the calendar, but the biggest push back likely came from teachers. The district got some relatively negative feedback from teachers after the calendar was introduced. That’s one of the reasons why the district reduced the number of intercession days from 10 down to six. Dr. Gutierrez says he thinks parents now largely get it, and he thinks that’s staff is now also starting to come around to the intercession concept.

“It’s critical that we address this problem as a result of COVID and I think the best way to go about it is to build in time and what I’m very thankful for is our community has embraced this change. It moves away from the traditional calendar. In fact, a lot of parents were asking that we add more days. We had parents on the committee that wanted more days for students that they know or their children that struggle and I think that we are going to see a lot of success with this calendar and it’s my hope that we can begin to start seeing the gains we were seeing last year before COVID hit,” said Gutierrez.

Public input was solicited for the calendar concept prior to this week’s approval. The new school calendar for 2021-2022 can be found on the Seguin ISD website at www.seguinisd.net.

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