Letter from the Superintendent: HB 2610

As you may recall HB 2610 went into effect during the 2015-2016 school year, which greatly impacted the development of school calendars. TEA now requires schools to have a minimum of 75,600 minutes of instruction instead of the traditional 180 days of instruction. As a result of the legislation, many districts adopted a calendar that approximates the minimum number of minutes required. Southside ISD is one of those districts.

The current Southside ISD calendar is 75,700 minutes of instructional time. While this does meet the Legislative requirement, there is very little room for change to our daily schedules.

We need to amend the adopted school calendar to change the last day of school to June 1st. The change will add approximately 2,000 minutes to the school year, and help to alleviate the challenges that come with the abbreviated calendar currently in place.

It is important that we make this change to accommodate the needs of the campuses and to help our buses run more efficiently. Currently our transportation department is having a difficult time turning around the routes in the afternoon to accommodate the current dismissal times. There is not enough time to drop off the elementary students and return to the secondary schools by the time they dismiss. The change in the calendar will allow us to slightly alter the starting and ending time of the school day so that our bus schedules are more efficient.

MEE

Mark E. Eads

Superintendent SISD

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