With House Bill 2610 being passed in May of 2015, school districts are now able to reorganize their schedule to have less days in their calendars. The bill changes the measure of instruction in schools from days to minutes. Districts are now required to schedule 75,600 minutes of instruction over the previous 180 day requirement. Most districts that are making changes started with altering their 2016-2017 calendars.

Currently, LISD has not shown interest in taking advantage of the new changes.

“At this time, I do not anticipate a change,” superintendent Ted Moore said. “We have a few extra minutes built into our current schedule which gives us some flexibility.”

However, districts in the area have already taken action to reduce the number of days both students and staff are required to be at school.

“[The new schedule] gives both students and staff kind of a day to catch their breath and take care of personal business and those kind of things,” said Doug Zambiasi, Frisco ISD assistant superintendent for support services. “We actually hope that it plays favor to staff [absences]. If teachers have a day off here and there, they’re less likely to take a day off because they have to handle personal matters if they know they can do them on those days.”

Even though the Lovejoy administration is not planning on altering their calendar, Moore understands the purpose of the bill.

“No changes are anticipated, but if we made a change it would be to standardize the number of minutes in each campus,” Moore said. “The bill is positive as it gives more flexibility to each school.”

The changes Frisco ISD made will extend the school day while insuring off days on Oct. 10, Feb. 27, and April 14.

“We saw a real advantage with continuing to work on teacher and staff improvement and that allows us to continue to do some ongoing training with our staff that we felt like was really important for us to continue to do,” Zambiasi said. “And that is probably the main reason for [the change].”