By Kelly Youngblood
Champaign Unit 4 families will see some some big changes to the calendar this school year.
The Unit 4 Board of Education voted 7-0 in favor of adding a fall break to the 2023-24 school calendar at a meeting in January.
This year the fall break will be Oct. 16-20. With parent-teacher conferences scheduled for Oct. 12-13, students will get a total of seven days off from school.
Stacey Moore, chief communications officer for Champaign Unit 4 School District, said one of the main reasons for the addition of the fall break was due to the elimination of the balanced calendar, which had previously been followed at Barkstall and Kenwood elementary schools.
“When Unit 4’s Board of Education approved the new student assignment program in January (2023), one of the key components was to add a fall break due to the removal of a balanced calendar,” Moore said.
The balanced-calendar schools traditionally enjoyed a multiple-week break in September and October.
Unit 4 superintendent Dr. Shelia Boozer sent families an email on Jan. 25, 2023, to communicate the upcoming changes with the new student assignment model and an assurance that “the Unit 4 team is working hard to minimize disruption in this process.”
Before the vote in January, former board of education member Chris Kloeppel voiced concerns about childcare for families during the fall break.
“I know we have many families that aren’t afforded the luxury of taking a vacation in October for a week,” he said. “What do we do about our families that need childcare?”
Boozer said the district was talking to the Champaign County YMCA and other community organizations to offer childcare during the fall break. Moore said the district’s Kids Plus program will be available for families who need childcare that week.
“This is very important and I want to make sure we take care of our families,” Boozer said.
Jeni Summers of Champaign, who has daughters in middle school and high school, said she doesn’t have to worry about childcare at this point in their schooling, but still empathizes with those that do.
“For working parents, they have to find another week of daycare,” she said.
Summers said she’d also rather not have an earlier start to the school year.
“It feels like summer still,” she said.
Dan Casillas, director of human resources development at Unit 4, said there’s no “perfect calendar” but emphasized it was created with the needs of families and staff in mind.
“If you look at any number of school districts in the area across the state, they all vary in some capacity,” Casillas said. “There’s some things people really like about them and of course some things people would like to change and so we try to propose something that meets the needs of all of our stakeholders.”
More information can be found from the January 23 Board of Education meeting here.