A recent agreement between the Alachua County Education Association (ACEA) and Alachua County Public Schools (ACPS) will reduce early release Wednesdays to once a month, instead of weekly occurrences, during the 2024-25 school year.
The early release Wednesdays will take place during the third week of every month, except in March 2025, when it will be the fourth Wednesday, March 26, to avoid conflict with spring break.
The previous schedule released students from school 68 minutes early every Wednesday, allowing teachers to use the time for planning, meetings and other activities.
According to an ACPS press release, the change will add about six days of instructional time to the school year, and teachers will have planning time on regular Wednesdays while their students are in other classes.
“We appreciate ACEA’s willingness to work with us on this change,” Superintendent Shane Andrew said in the release. “It will give our students much more direct instructional time, which is critical to raising their academic achievement.”
Carmen Ward, president of the ACEA, said at a school board meeting on Tuesday that in May, the school district bargaining team threatened to call the negotiation an impasse if the ACEA did not relinquish its strong contract language on maintaining early release Wednesdays.
According to Ward, the ACEA finally compromised to reduce early release Wednesdays to avoid an impasse, but the district has not agreed to the ACEA’s proposed 3.4% raise. Instead, it has maintained its 1.6% offer.
“We have some, many issues to resolve in negotiations,” Ward said at the meeting. “And we definitely want to continue, and we want to do what is most respectful, giving the employees in this district the most dignity that we can, and there are a lot of concerns about the budget that we are going to be tentatively approving, and I definitely think there is room for improving employee salaries.”
The ACEA and school district started negotiations for the 2024-25 school year in February, almost immediately after finalizing the 2023-24 school year contract, which included a 3.5% raise in addition to the automatic step increase.
Multiple teachers also attended Tuesday’s meeting to support the call for a larger pay increase.
School Board Member Tina Certain said the school district and citizen voters have been “very generous,” and told attendees that the school district does not have the authority to set its own millage rate, and its state funding matches locally-gathered funding, from the 1 mill for schools, and the half-cent sales tax.
Within that funding, some money is set aside for specific areas of operation.
“We have to operate within that allotment of the money that we have,” Certain said. “I know I’m not one to want to nickel-and-dime employees. I believe in paying fairly, but we have the constraint where the five of us are not deciding on the total amount of funding.”
Certain said the district has been flush with federal COVID relief funding, and now as those funds sunset, it must re-adjust.
A full schedule of start and dismissal times for the upcoming school year, including early release Wednesdays, is available at https://www.sbac.edu/schoolhours.