As students throughout the CPS district spend today sleeping in or catching up on their favorite TV show, teachers across elementary, middle and high school are collaborating with their Professional Learning Teams (PLTs) about current curriculum standards or catching up on their own class work.
These “flex days” are just one of the two different types of teacher work days the district hosts throughout the school year, giving students the day off in return.
“Generally, a district work day means a district collaboration day, where teachers of the same content across the district come together,” chemistry teacher Barry Still said. “What happens on a flex day is governed by the building principal instead of the district.”
The different meetings and conferences CPS faculty must participate in on teacher work days varies depending on which type of work day is scheduled. Still said on district work days, teachers are separated by the core classes they teach in order to discuss curriculum and objectives that need to be met across the district. For science teachers, this means discussing curriculum for biology, physics, and chemistry classes as well as basic curriculum objectives for all high school science classes.
“On district collaboration days, all of the science teachers come together at one of the buildings, and we have a district wide departmental meeting. So in the morning, the science coordinator, Mike Szydlowski, talks to us about things that are going on in the district as a whole. After that it kind of varies from collaboration day to collaboration day, but we do some sort of professional development. On Friday [February 13] for instance, we talked about the ACT and helping students on the science section,” Still said. “Then at some point, we break into our content specific groups — bio, chemistry, and physics — and talk about our curriculum to make sure we line up with one another.”
Compared to district work days, the responsibilities teachers have on flex days are markedly different, as the school building’s principal determines how the time is spent rather than a district coordinator. Along with district work days, teachers must spend a minimum of eight hours throughout the semester collaborating with other teachers from the same core area.

Although flex days are scheduled to provide time for building-wide collaboration, those hours can be made up outside of school to leave teachers’ schedules open later on. Biology teacher Kaitlin Rulon said RBHS faculty makes up its planning time regularly throughout the semester, leaving scheduled flex days as individual work days instead.
“Every week, teachers participate in a PLT meeting, which is out of our contract time and every other week, we have what is called Shared Planning that cuts into our conference time,” Rulon said. “Between those two things, we actually put in way more time than eight hours a semester, but our flex day rewards us that time, in a sense.”
The district’s school Calendar Committee, comprised of multiple Board of Education members as well as additional members appointed by the Board, decides the dates for these teacher work days, as well as the type of work day that will occur, at least a year in advance. However, Board of Education member Jan Mees said that amount of time has recently been even longer.
“Under the leadership of Superintendent Belcher, the district began developing calendars for two years out in 2012 -2013 due to the upcoming opening of Battle High School. For example, the board approved the 2015-2016 calendar in March 2014. However, sometimes adjustments have to be made,” Mees said. “ At the recommendation of administration, the board will be asked for and give approval to calendar changes if the board deems the changes appropriate.”
The school board takes many things into consideration before finalizing the CPS calendar, Mees said, such as “adherence to state laws [concerning] the number of days or hours a district is in session,” “the number of days in each semester,” and “parent/teacher conference dates” for elementary and middle schools.
Once the rough schedule has been created, the proposed calendar is sent out to parents and teachers for their input and suggestions. Then, the calendar committee votes in April on adopting the revised calendar. Even in this final step, Mees said, teachers and faculty throughout the CPS district have a say in whether or not the proposed calendar should be adopted for the coming school year.
“Teachers and staff representatives are part of the committee and have been for many years,” Mees said. “I served on the Calendar Committee when I was President of the Columbia Community Teachers Association — now CMSTA. I have also been the board representative to the Calendar Committee a number of times so I cross over in my perspective having been a teacher and parent.”
Yet Still said he does not feel teachers have a large say in the decision-making process when it comes to when teacher work days occur and which days are flex days or district collaboration days.
“Collaboration days are set by the district — specifically they are set by the district’s calendar committee,” Still said. “I believe that there are teachers on that committee, but teachers, as a whole, are never polled about our feelings about when they should occur.”
Similarly, Rulon said she is confused about how the calendar committee makes such decisions on collaboration days. While she knows collaboration days usually occur in specific months, she said she doesn’t know much about the rest of the process.
“I know that we always have two [collaboration days] in November, two in April, and the other one tends to be in September, plus our back-to-school days,” Rulon said. “My guess would be [the days are scheduled close to one another] so if there’s carry over from one professional development day, it’s not months before the next one. But, the PD days that are close to each other have different purposes…. Honestly, I don’t know.”
In fact, most teacher collaboration days occur in November and February, making full weeks of school in these months scarce at best. Yet Mees said collaboration days are scheduled closely to one another to help elementary and middle school teachers plan for parent/teacher conferences and allow time for finalizing grades.
“You could call it the perfect storm — it does seem to happen that way. However, those work days are specifically placed in November and February because our elementary schools are on trimesters and grading and parent teacher conferences fall in those months,” Mees said. “As a board, we often hear concerns or complaints from parents. It is difficult to please all constituents in a community, but the greatest good drives our decisions about calendars and all other issues brought to the board.”
While he doesn’t necessarily disagree with when teacher collaboration days occur throughout the school year, Still said he feels flex days are more beneficial to his classroom than district collaboration days. He said he believes flex days should occur more often than they do under the current system, as they provide teachers with more time to focus specifically on their students rather than the district as a whole.
“I wish that we had less district-wide collaboration days and more building collaboration days. It’s nice to have the district days once or twice a year, but this year, I think we’ve had three or four district days and no building days,” Still said. “I want to be able to have some time in my classroom working on things that matter to me, my colleagues and our students.”
By Nicole Schroeder
infographic by Jenna Liu