Audubon School Board approves July 26th graduation date and FY20/FY21 Calendar changes

(Audubon) The Audubon School District will hold graduation on July 26^th.

Audubon Superintendent Eric Trager said the Board approved the plans at their meeting Friday evening.

“We had a lot of conversations with; we had a small group of senior parents that we visited with and then we contacted the senior class officers and had those officers contact their classmates and so we feel like we got a lot of input into this decision. The seniors felt like it was very important to try our best to have some sort of a ceremony, even though it might be reduced in scope, at least they would have some sort of ceremony that would be a little more formal and they’d be able to graduate as a class together,” explained Trager. “So, we’re going to try to do something on July 26th and hopefully we’ll be able to give them what they have asked for.”

Trager said the Board also approved FY20 and FY21 Calendar changes. He said they will be ending school on May 22, 2020.

“Essentially, we’re recognizing the fact that, you know, this homeschooling and virtual learning that we’re asking families to do is putting a lot of additional stress on families and so we wanted to have a hard end date so they knew when they could basically be excused from those activities and so we landed on May 22^nd, which is actually seven school days earlier than we planned to end our school year,” said Trager.

Trager said in return for that they are going to start school next year on August 17^th.

“Our thinking there is that we’re going to trade some virtual days for hopefully some face-to-face days and it will start getting kids caught up from what they missed from this past year,” said Trager.

In other action, the Board approved a MOU with the teachers that gets into the details on how everything will work with the change in school days. The Board also approved another pandemic pay resolution to continue paying their staff and waive whatever board policies that are affected by the pandemic.

And, the Board awarded a contract to Carroll Control Systems out of Carroll to do some rooftop unit replacement and additional HVAC work this summer.