Several years ago, the Iowa legislature and the Department of Education gave Iowa school districts the option to continue to count student contact days or to switch to counting student instructional hours. Most districts, including G-R, made the switch to counting hours. Under this system, students must attend school for a minimum of 1,080 hours (the equivalent of 180 days times 6 hours per day).

This system allows for more flexibility in setting school calendars and has allowed G-R to adopt a calendar that had fewer student days in order to have all-day trainings for teachers, rather than the early outs that were necessary in the past to accomplish the training and collaboration time that our staff needs or is required to complete.

The G-R calendar had an additional 59 hours built into it – mostly because our school day has 6 hours and 35 minutes in each day. With early outs or late starts for weather, and school time missed for state tournaments, we had 34 additional hours beyond the minimum.

Due to this, the board made the decision to have the last day of school on Thursday, June 2 and have dismissal time that day at 2:30 PM. The calendar on the school website reflects this change. If you have a printed calendar at home, it has the last day of school on May 26, but we are making up most of our snow days, so please be aware of that.