Have you ever heard a couple discussing where they should go out to eat and the discussion starts with one spouse saying "Oh, I don't care. You pick."
"OK, how about we go over to Herman's?"
What’s the point?
Proposals for a new calendar and new attendance zone boundaries represent significant changes for Bentonville Public Schools. Decision-making requires patience on the part of all.
"No, there was a Razorback game today and it's bound to have a line."
"OK, let's scoot over to the Marketplace Grill."
"I just ate there for lunch the other day."
"Fine, where do you want to go?"
"Oh, anywhere's fine."
"Why not Fred's Hickory Inn? There is always something good there."
"I don't want to go that far tonight."
And finally, the other spouse gives up. "Well, I'll just get the bread and peanut butter out and we'll stay in."
Sometimes it's hard for someone to form an opinion about a subject in the abstract, but put a specific idea in front of him and he'll know whether he likes it or not.
That appears to be the scenario surrounding the Bentonville School Board's recent discussion over a proposed calendar for the 2016-17 school year. School calendars define which days kids and teachers will be in class, which days will be set aside for teacher training, and when school breaks will be.
In Bentonville, the school board has already made a major decision regarding future school-year calendars: All schools will operate on the same calendar. That hasn't been true for years, as two elementary schools have operated on extended-year calendars that provided more short breaks during the school year, but shortened the summer break.
Elementary school principals, however, led the charge over the last year to convert all schools to a single calendar as one method of more efficiently dealing with overcrowding at some schools. By putting all elementary schools on the same schedule, they argued, the school district would gain flexibility in assigning students and be able to bring more stability to school attendance assignments.
The question isn't finished, however. With the one-calendar decision made, the next decision is which calendar to adopt. The district got more than 5,000 responses back from a survey of parents, teachers, students and others. That's an impressive number for any request for feedback. At a recent meeting, the school district administration put forth a proposal, and the discussion sounded a lot like that couple looking for a restaurant.
It's not that the proposal was terrible. It just provided a starting point.
But it also looked a lot like the traditional calendar on which most schools in the district have operated. The school board, some members said, had expected more of an effort to develop a hybrid of the two previous calendar models. Board member Joe Quinn went so far as to suggest the board, if it adopted the administration's proposal, would be violating a public trust with the parents of students at Elm Tree and Baker elementaries. Those are the two schools that have operated on an extended-year schedule, one obviously popular with the students who chose to attend there.
The proposal looked like a kick in the teeth to the populations served by those schools, but as noted above, every discussion has to start somewhere. The bigger question is what administrators and the school board come back with next.
A major sticking point was the length of an October vacation. The administration looked at survey results showing 21.72 percent favored no October vacation at all. That compares to 30.23 percent that wanted a five-day break. That only tells part of the story, though. Another 36 percent said they favored an October vacation of three days or less.
The administration proposal went with a three-day break in October. The proposal would keep the two-week winter break and a weeklong break at Thanksgiving and Spring Break. Any days off added has an impact on either the start date or end date of the school year.
The administration's proposal made it seem the whole process had primarily been about eliminating the nontraditional school calendars and very little about creating a true hybrid. But, as we said, every proposal has to start somewhere.
"I never promised anything to anybody," board President Travis Riggs told his colleagues. Implicit in running for the office however, is a promise to listen to staff, school patrons, students and others affected by school board decisions. That's precisely what's needed in this scenario.
Our prediction: This calendar discussion will fade fairly quickly from view as the school board turns its attention to redesigning the attendance zones for the district's schools. Superintendent Michael Poore and other school district leaders held a forum last week to discussion a proposal that, they stressed, was just a starting point for discussion.
Hmm, sounds a lot like the calendar proposal.
All of these decisions send ripples throughout the pond known at the Bentonville School District, and reaching a conclusion takes time and considering of many conflicting albeit desirable options. Dena Ross, the district's chief operating officer. warned at the meeting about attendance zones that a change might be a positive for one family but create a negative for another.
School board members and the patrons of the district will need extra doses of patience amid the negotiations that must accompany such changes. In a growing district, these kinds of decisions cannot be avoided.
But that's better than being in a district that's dying on the vine, as many communities in Arkansas have witnessed.
As they say, these are good problems to have.
Commentary on 02/09/2016