|
Getting your Trinity Audio player ready...
|
After just one year since transitioning from trimesters to semesters, Livermore Valley Joint Unified School District high school students are in for another adjustment in the 2025-26 school year.
Livermore high schools will abide by a modified block schedule with six-periods, an optional A and/or B period via three anchor days and two alternating block days.
Considered to be a pilot program, the new schedule allots overall more time per class every week, increased frequency of class meetings and about triple the time for academic support, compared to the current A/B day semester schedule.
Implementing the new schedule will cost more than the current one, but the price will be manageable, LVJUSD superintendent Torie Gibson said.
The district decided to switch-up the high school schedules at a regular Board of Education meeting on Dec. 17, where trustees unanimously approved the transition via a non-binding agreement with the Livermore Education Association — a union representing teachers, counselors, nurses, psychologists, teachers on special assignment and speech pathologists within the school district.
Intended to best serve students and ensure “reasonable working conditions for teachers”, the schedule may be modified or extended by mutual agreement, according to the memorandum of understanding.
“We had a new schedule that was relatively untenable and we had a lot of issues, so we’re trying to repair something,” Trustee Craig Bueno said at the meeting.
In the upcoming school year, the three anchor days per week feature periods lasting about one hour each. Meanwhile, alternating block days feature periods of about one and a half hours in length.
Also included in the new schedule are two access periods per week, one lasting 30 minutes and the other lasting about an hour — this gives students about triple the amount of time for academic support every week compared to the current schedule.
Teachers will also be impacted by the new schedule, as full-time will consist of 10 sections per year instead of 12 sections.
The new schedule marks a transition away from the current set-up where high school students have eight periods split into alternating days A and B. Periods each last about an hour and a half on most days of the week, except Wednesday where periods are each about an hour long. Also on Wednesdays, students currently have an academic support period lasting 25 minutes.
The new schedule proposal emerged out of a collaboration by committee representatives from Granada High, Livermore High, Del Valle High, Vineyard High School, LEA leadership, a representative from Tri-Valley ROP, district leadership, site leadership and board of trustee representatives, according to the MOU.
The group settled on the proposed schedule after two in-person meetings and a couple weeks of emailing in between those gatherings, Gibson said.
In the end, 84.4% of all LEA employees who were eligible to vote approved of the proposed schedule, according to the board agenda.
“Looking at this compared to other district schedules, I think ours is better,” LHS athletic director James Petersdorf said at the meeting. “We took the best of what we saw out there and we kind of made it our own and we turned out something that’s great.”
Also during the meeting, Jerry Yalon — a member of the Citizens’ Bond Oversight Committee, which monitors bond finances of the district — supported the schedule but expressed concern over the exclusion of parents from its creation and the unknown cost of its implementation.
“It’s not just important what you decide, but how you do it,” Yalon said. “Please don’t vote to approve a project that you don’t know the cost for. That is bad government.”
There will be savings under the current schedule, but other districts are moving away from it because it is still considered expensive, Gibson said.
As for implementing the new schedule, the exact cost is unknown at this time, Gibson said. But it will be greater than the current schedule because of the A and B periods.
“We are pretty confident that we will be within the means of where we need to be budgetarily,” Gibson said. “But we can’t work through that process until we have an approval of the MOU.”
Parental involvement in creating the schedule wasn’t possible because it is a negotiable item with the teachers union and bargaining unit, Gibson explained.
“When we can include parents and students, of course that’s always going to be our goal. Unfortunately this just isn’t one of those items we could do that with,” she said.
Moving forward, the district is open to feedback regarding the schedule, Gibson said.
As for next steps, LVJUSD will work with the high schools to determine the classes scheduled for the A and B period, according to Gibson.
“A huge thank you to the LEA leadership who helped us put together a really, truly diverse group of people in that room. It did not always go with rainbows and unicorns, throughout the two days,” Gibson said. “But I think at the end of the day we landed in a really good place.”
