In December, the Regional and Southborough School Committees voted to adopt the school calendar for 2026-27. The majority of members voted to schedule Professional Development Days on three religious holidays.
The Northborough School Committee failed to adopt a calendar due to a split tie vote among the four attending members. The Committee was scheduled to vote again at their January meeting. According to the Community Advocate, that effort was put on hold after the district received complaints from the Algonquin Regional Teachers Association.
I’m sharing information from the CA’s story, with a detailed look back at the discussion and votes in November.
The CA wrote:
According to Superintendent Gregory Martineau, the [ARTA] informed both him and the Regional School Committee following the Dec. 16 combined meeting that it was unhappy with the committees’ option. He added that while the teacher associations in Northborough and Southborough didn’t reject the calendar, they would prefer not to have professional development on days of religious observance.
Martineau said he will work to revise the recommended calendar and see if the Southborough School Committee and the Regional School Committee have an “appetite” to vote again.
“I think in the way we did it, it didn’t provide for full discussion and full understanding of what we were looking at,” Martineau said.
The December Decision
I was surprised to learn that the committees adopted “Option 3” of the four presented draft options for the calendar. (You can view those here.)
Based on last year’s discussions, I expected them to select “Option 1” or “Option 2”, both of which mirrored this year’s calendar by including days off for significant religious/cultural holidays.
Last year, the majority of members across the committees had supported the “inclusive” calendar. There was also a voiced desire to try to stick with a consistent model for as long as possible, rather than revamping it each year. There had been a vocal minority who had opposed including all of the religious holidays. (Southborough had it’s own split vote and follow up vote on the issue last year.) But they had pushed for a “secular calendar” which, purports not to carve out any religious holiday. There was no fully secular version presented this year.
Looking back at the December meeting, I learned that the main reason behind the change is a prior ARTA position combined with a difficult calendar year.
Under the Collective Bargaining Agreements (CBA), the earliest Algonquin’s teachers’ calendars should begin is the Monday before Labor Day. That rules Option 2 out, which starts with PD days in late August.
This year, Labor Day falls on the latest day it can in the calendar, September 7th. That means that, by default, Professional Development Days can’t begin until August 31st, and the first day of school is September 3rd (about a week later than usual.) That is the schedule included under Options 1 and 3.
But, there is an exception to the school start date rule. The district can negotiate a “mutually agreed upon” alternative. That’s what they successfully did for Option 4, which was apparently blessed by the ARTA. That version would begin PD days on Thursday, August 26th. To ease the transition, it included a four-day Labor Day weekend by giving students and staff Friday, September 4th off. Like Option 3, it ended on June 17 and scheduled Eid al-Fitr as a PD day, with the intent of rotating which religious observances are used for PD days in future years.
Two of the five religious holidays the district has been grappling with will fall on weekends next year. But committee members still need to determine how to handle the three that will fall on what would normally be school days: Yom Kippur (Friday, September 21), Eid al-Fitr (Wednesday, March 10), and Good Friday (March 26). Plus, the calendar needs to account for the Juneteenth state holiday if school cancellations push the end of the school year that late in June.
In describing the options, Martineau advised against Option 1, due to the late end of the school year. He told committee members that the last day of school would be June 21st, which he believed was too late. If it was a “difficult year” with cancellations, there would only be room to extend the calendar by “6 or 7 days”.1
Based on Martineau’s recommendation, none of the members pushed for Option 1. The debate was between 3 & 4, with some members having differing rationales and arguments. While the Option 3 is more inclusive for NSBORO students, it is less inclusive for school staff members.
Northborough School Committee member Kristen Guenette asked about feedback from the teachers about the impact to them of having PD days on the holidays. Martineau responded that they had gotten feedback about religious observance prohibiting some teachers from participating in the professional learning. He followed that they were trying to strike a balance. He recommended that Option 4 would allow them to “mitigate” impacts by rotating which religious holidays (and therefore which staff members) would lose out on PD days if they take their allowed religious observance.
Upon further questioning from Southborough’s Paul Desmond, he admitted there is “no guarantee” that the same content would be offered again at another time, though the district tries to be “mindful” of those instances.
Northborough’s Sean O’Shea raised his concern that they had previously talked about trying to adopt a multi-year trial for the inclusive model. He felt that multiple years are necessary to learn if a model is working.
Regional School Committee member Chris Covino of Northborough advocated again for a secular calendar, referring to the school system as a secular organization. He didn’t like having the committee select which religious holidays they prefer over others. As she did last year, Southborough Chair Chelsea Malinowski agreed. But she supported Option 3 as an “outside the box” option with more balance than this year’s.
Southborough member Alan Zulick was willing to vote for either Option 3 or 4, but preferred Option 4. He saw it as being simpler. He believed that rotating the PD day was a step towards being inclusive. He acknowledged that including the religious holidays makes it more difficult for some families with two working parents. But he referred to that as a “cost to being inclusive” that he was personally willing to pay. For him, the reason to potentially narrow holidays down in the future would be if they learned after a few years of data that there was an educational cost to the calendar. In that case, he believed that discussing which religions could be included was in their purview.
There was a bit of back and forth with Malinowski who pointed out that by including a limited number of religious holidays, they are already upsetting some community members whose holidays aren’t included. She said they could never make everyone happy, or school would never end. Zulick countered that he would rather be “a bit better” than say they shouldn’t do anything.
Southborough’s Laura Kaufman asked Martineau how the administration would measure if they are on the right path. Martineau said the Calendar Study Group knew they hadn’t completely solved all the problems, and there was no perfect calendar. A long answer indicated that there’s no real way to “measure” the impact. But the administration would be communicating with the community about the disruptions to families’ schedules, how marginalized community groups feel, etc. He knew that current members couldn’t make decisions for future iterations of the committee, but he hoped they could at least make “a good faith effort” for two years
Roger Challen commented to let the public know that the committee members had each received the many “compelling” emails that residents had sent in on the topic. (He noted that with some of them using identical language, it felt more like a petition.) He wanted to reassure that the opinions are considered by members before they vote.
Votes are cast by individual committees, rather than the majority of the combined members. And while each school district can adopt its own calendar, upon questioning, Martineau advocated for a shared calendar for the three districts. He highlighted the logistic challenges due to sharing transportation, food services, and other operational commonality.
The Regional School Committee voted first, with 7-2 approving Option 3. (The members who opposed were Covino and Kathleen Polutchko.) For Southborough, both Denise Eddy and Kaufman made clear their votes were based on wanting the lower schools to be on the same schedule as Algonquin because of families with kids in both. Their vote was 4-1 in favor of Option 3 with Roger Challen voting opposed. Northborough’s vote, held between the two other committees, was tied. The plan was to revisit it at their next meeting when they would hopefully have five members present.
Next Steps
Based on the Community Advocate’s news, you can expect the calendar issue to now be revisited on the future agendas of all three committees. Based on the fact that the ARTA previously supported Option 4, that may be the version that the administration will urge committees to vote for.
However, despite the teacher union’s complaint, it doesn’t sound like the ARTA’s CBA gives them the right to block the committees from moving ahead with Option 3 if that’s the path that members prefer.
