The Appleton Area School District Board of Education held a special meeting 04/21/2021 to consider the addition of a new learning model for the grades 9-12 educational framework. The original proposed plan would have kept Wednesdays virtual and then added 15 minutes of additional instructional time onto the 4 classes students attend each day Monday-Tuesday and Thursday-Friday for a total of 4 additional hours per week of instructional time. The Board eventually voted to reduce those added instructional minutes to only 10 minutes per class per day for a total of 160 additional instructional minutes (2.67 hours) per week.
There had been some confusion among the public due to statements made at the 04/12/2021 Board of Education meeting. Staff had made reference to a third option that they were working on in order to present which made it sound like they would be presenting three potential learning model options. However, they only presented one option which when added to the two in-person options a part of the learning matrix (i.e. the 2 day a week hybrid option and the 4 day week option currently being utilized) made up a third option.
The Board opted to not add the full originally recommended 15 minutes per class because they were worried doing so would take away too much from current student support time, which Ben Vogel in particular thought would cause an equity issue.
At Jim Clemon’s prompting the Board explicitly included a start date of May 3 when they voted to approve this new option. Barry O’Connor and Jim Bowman would have preferred to not include an explicit start date so that the administrative team would have as much flexibility as possible, but they did not fight it’s inclusion.
So, it appears that, starting May 3, the AASD 7th-12th graders will have an additional 40 minutes of instructional time per day for the five final weeks of the school year.
View full Board of Education meeting here: https://youtu.be/CdpzSNzq3zE
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