BELEN — The Belen Board of Education unanimously approved the 2024-25 school year calendar recently. The calendar follows a traditional schedule with 180 instructional days and no abbreviated days.
To get to those 180 days, students will spend 178 days in school, plus two sets of two parent-teacher conference days — one in the fall and one in the spring semester.
Under current New Mexico Public Education Department rules, parent-teacher conference days can count toward the 180 day total required for districts, Belen Consolidated Schools Superintendent Lawrence Sanchez told board members at the April 9 board meeting.
“Last year (legislation) specified that if districts didn’t meet the same number of instructional hours as the 2022-23 school year, then your operating budget didn’t happen,” Sanchez said. “To make sure we meet those requirements of PED — which we didn’t have until 10 days ago — we’ve been building the calendar on last year’s forms, which was difficult. We have to make sure we had a chance to get it through (PED).”
The department put through a proposed rule change last December for a 180-day calendar, the superintendent said, causing the district to suspend its calendar development process to wait and see what the final rules were.
“After spring break (N.M. Secretary of Education Arsenio Romero) made a decision on school calendars,” Sanchez said. “The new rules included 1,140 instructional hours for all calendars.”
Sanchez said this was the first time in his memory that academic calendars had requirements for both the number of days and hours in a school year. By definition, students must be in class for five and a half hours a day in order for it to count as an instructional day, he said.
“Some of the rules we played under until very recently don’t fly anymore,” Sanchez said. “Half days don’t count as instructional days. By definition of PED, the minimum is five and a half hours.”
Time in the calendar for professional development of teachers is also a requirement. Districts are allowed to count 60 hours of professional development for the elementary level and 30 for secondary, the superintendent said. Professional development for teachers at the high school level will happen after six and a half hours of instruction and after six hours at the elementaries. Those professional development hours are built into teachers’ contracted hours after school on Wednesdays.
“Right now, the teacher contract day is seven hours,” Sanchez said. “If we are letting out a half an hour early, we still have time in the contract day for professional development.”
The 2024-25 school calendar for BCS sets the first day of school on Thursday, Aug. 1, and the last day on Friday, May 23, 2025.
Four full days of professional development for teachers are on the calendar on July 30-31 and Jan. 2-3, 2025.
Parent-teacher conferences are scheduled for Oct. 10-11 and March 6-7, 2025.
Julia M. Dendinger began working at the VCNB in 2006. She covers Valencia County government, Belen Consolidated Schools and the village of Bosque Farms. She is a member of the Society of Professional Journalists Rio Grande chapter’s board of directors.
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June 13, 2024
