State College Area School Board Approves 2021-22 Academic Calendar

State College Area School Board on Monday unanimously approved a 2021-22 academic calendar that will include the return of a weeklong spring break.

The school year will begin on Tuesday, Aug. 24 and the last day will be Friday, June 3. High school commencement is scheduled for June 4.

“We had a lot of discussions around that, whether we would start the week before Labor Day or two weeks before,” Will Stout, assistant superintendent for secondary education, said during a discussion of the calendar at the board’s Feb. 15 meeting. “We strongly believe that we get more value instructionally with our students at the end of August … than we get the later we move into June. So we prioritized that earlier starting date so we could get out earlier in June.”

Spring break will be March 7-11.

For the current school year, the board voted in November to eliminate the spring break scheduled for the week of March 8 and redistribute the days off throughout the second half of the school year.

That decision was made to discourage travel during the COVID-19 pandemic and because Penn State canceled its spring break. The university’s annual week off is historically the primary reason SCASD has scheduled a coinciding spring break of its own.

Another change to the calendar, Martin Luther King Jr. Day on Jan. 17 will be an Act 80 Day with professional learning focused on equity and inclusivity. Students have no school that day.

Five snow make-up days are built into the calendar on April 18, May 27 and June 6-8. The district also will apply to the Pennsylvania Department of Education to be able to use up to five Flexible Instruction Days should the district exceed the make-up days in the calendar. The FID program, which has been used by other Centre County school districts this year, allows schools to offer alternate methods that can be online or offline to meet instructional day requirements in circumstances such as hazardous weather or emergencies.

Schools can use no more than five FIDs in an academic year.

SCASD typically adopts its calendar for the following school year in January, but Stout noted the calendar committee wanted to have “a better handle” on the circumstances surrounding COVID-19. The calendar went through four iterations before it was brought to the board .

“I think this is a really sound calendar educationally for our students moving into next school year, particularly given all of the changes we had to make to this current calendar because of COVID,” Stout said.