TGIF: La Grange School Ditching Many Fridays
The big news coming out of the LGISD March School Board meeting was the adoption of a four-day week hybrid calendar for the 2025-26 school year.
The calendar is considered hybrid because the students will attend five days a week during the months of August and September for the fall semester and January and February for the spring semester. The other months, the students will have Fridays off. The school year will begin a bit earlier with a start date of Aug. 6 and an end date of May 21.
The school day will be longer running from 8 a.m. to 3:50 p.m. daily for middle school and elementary and the high school from 7:55 a.m. to 3:45 p.m. This new calendar results in four less school days per semester (so eight total for the year) than the traditional five-day schedule that was being considered.
During the discussion, Superintendent Andy McHazlett commented about the hybrid/ balanced semester calendar “It was important for high school, and important for me too, because of the instruction time.” He continued, “To me, it’s the best version of meeting what we want to do for staff and meeting what we think is best for students that you could possibly have.”
Middle School math teacher Michelle Caughman had this to say, “I will say that I am due for retirement soon and thinking about having a hybrid calendar and having some extra Fridays off is an incentive for me to stay a little bit longer. I usually work every Saturday. I come up and I’m there for three to four hours. If I could do that on a Friday and have my Saturday and Sunday with my family, then that would be all the better.”
Prior to the vote, McHazlett said, “I think if we do decide to do it, (the hybrid schedule) it’s a two-year pilot. You got to go one year to get it going, then the next year to look at data. I don’t think you can look at it one year and say, hey, we know the results, we’re comfortable. I think we say, we’re going to try this for two years. And we’ll evaluate it every year, obviously, to make improvements.
“A lot of districts would have just said, you know what, let’s just do the fourday, but we had teachers concerned about wanting to make sure they felt comfortable with academics.
“And that’s why we went back to the drawing board and came up with this hybrid schedule because we do care about kids. We are in the kid business. And I felt very proud to be at La Grange ISD when I heard numerous teachers say, ‘you know, I’m concerned about the academics. I want to make sure.’ And then after we came up with this calendar, they said, ‘I can work with that.’”