School days at Oak Ridge High School will be five minutes longer starting today, Oak Ridge High School Principal Jody Goins said in a Sunday e-mail to students, parents, staff, and others.
High school students will now be dismissed at 2:55 p.m. on Monday, Tuesday, Thursday, and Friday. They will be dismissed at 1:40 p.m. on Wednesdays, a shorter school day in Oak Ridge.
The new schedule will be in effect through the rest of the school year, Goins said.
“As mentioned previously, it was recently brought to the attention of the Oak Ridge Schools’€™ Board of Education and Superintendent’s office that we need to modify our existing schedule slightly to fulfill the requirement set forth by the Tennessee Department of Education and the Tennessee School Boards Association regarding minimum instructional minutes per day,” Goins said in the e-mail. “In accordance with this requirement, we will be lengthening our instructional day by five minutes every day.”
Confused says
According to this, they were short 75 minutes a week. How does 5 minutes a day make up for that?http://www.wbir.com/news/article/236449/2/Oak-Ridge-High-adds-class-time-after-deficit-found
oakie99 says
If you read the article again, it says they are also taking 10 min. a day away from their lunch time, so 50 min. + 25 each week = 75 min.
Lorri says
I still don’t understand why OR has short Wednesdays… with all the talk about how much there is to teach kids, and how much teachers feel they are cramming into each year… wouldn’t that extra half day a week make a big difference to our kids?
Angi Agle says
Lorri, the short Wednesdays are used for professional development for our teachers (instead of taking off a couple of days each year for teacher inservice, as most school systems do), as well as things like team meetings so that teachers can compare notes on individual students’ progress and identify any problems early enough to do something about it. We’ve done it this way since 1969, and it works well.