Liberty Hill ISD explores option of moving to 4-day school week | FOX 7 Austin

Liberty Hill ISD explores option of moving to 4-day school week

Liberty Hill ISD is exploring the option of moving to a four-day school week for the 2025-26 school year.

The district says this allows more staff development days in the school year.

Breakdown of Calendar A and Calendar B

The backstory:

A Liberty Hill ISD school board meeting held in December laid out options for a four-day school week, using Calendar A and Calendar B.

A survey on the calendars was sent out to parents and staff and more than 2,400 community members responded.

"We sent out 2 calendar options. One was Calendar A, the other was Calendar B. Both of them meet the minimum structure requirements of 75,600 minutes and 187 teacher and campus days," says Liberty Hill ISD Chief of Schools Travis Motal.

According to the district, Calendar B has three fewer days than Calendar A.

Calendar B also has 16 staff development days, nearly double the amount of Calendar A.

Those staff development days in Calendar B fall on Mondays, meaning students would be out of school.

"Calendar A 67%, strongly agree. Calendar B 57 % agree, strongly agree," says Motal.

Breakdown of Calendar B Plus and Calendar C

The backstory:

After the December meeting and receiving feedback, the district went back to the drawing board and created new calendars, presenting those at a board meeting held this month.

"We created a Calendar B Plus option. It is really the Calendar B that y’all saw earlier except it moves all the Mondays to Fridays. We went ahead and created a Calendar C option which is more of what people kind of originally thought the calendar would look like, which is more of a true four-day week from the beginning of the school year all the way to the end," says Motal.

In the new Calendar B Plus option, staff development days would be moved to Fridays instead of Mondays. 

Calendar C would have no early release days and may require adding up to 20 minutes to the school day.

What's next:

The district says it is still in the process of collecting feedback and looking into childcare, staffing, and transportation.

A decision is expected to be made by February 18 after the calendars are reviewed by the Liberty Hill District Educational Improvement Committee.

The Source: Information from interviews conducted by FOX 7 Austin's Tan Radford

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