All but two public high schools statewide are on track to provide increased instructional hours that will be mandated next school year — a marked turnaround from this time last year, when only two secondary schools were providing the required learning time.
Starting this fall, the state’s 101 middle and high schools will have to provide a minimum 51⁄2 hours of instruction a day, on average, for a total of 990 hours a year. The mandate is part of a 2010 law that lengthened Hawaii’s school year and imposed minimum classroom time to meet or exceed national levels.
The law requires that all public schools have at least 180 instructional days a year — a provision that all schools are meeting.
But the phased-in increases in learning time have been a challenge as schools work to overhaul their schedules to comply without exceeding teachers’ contracted seven-hour workday and other requirements in the labor contract such as teacher preparation time.
A legal opinion presented to the state Board of Education on Tuesday helped ease some of the ambiguity over what can count toward a school’s tally of instructional time.
State Deputy Attorney General James Halvorson said because "student instructional time" is broadly defined in statute, the Department of Education can interpret that to include, for example, time students spend in study hall and homeroom periods — an interpretation the teachers union has opposed.
Act 167 defines it for all schools as time when students "are engaged in learning activities including regularly scheduled instruction and learning assessments within the curriculum." The law discounts only lunch, recess and between-class time.
The board received applications from 39 schools seeking waivers from the instructional time requirements because their proposed 2014-15 school schedules were rejected by the Hawaii State Teachers Association for counting minutes spent in homeroom and study hall toward the 990-hour target.
The teachers union argues that instructional time should be collectively bargained, not mandated by law. HSTA Executive Director Al Nagasako said the schools seeking waivers were forced to produce "fictitious" bell schedules by including noninstructional time, and called it "deceptive and not in the spirit of the law."
Nagasako said rejecting the schedules — which had to be approved by at least two-thirds of a school’s faculty — "would send an honest and powerful message to the lawmakers that Act 167 cannot be implemented without first negotiating with the Hawaii State Teachers Association."
Principals of 22 of the 39 schools testified before the BOE on Tuesday, asking the board to approve their calculations, saying the schedules were collaboratively developed with teachers.
The board ultimately agreed with Halvorson’s opinion that the 39 schools will meet the 990-hour requirement.
"The best decisions are made at the school level. I’m proud of the schools and the difficult process they went through in order to place a primary emphasis on student achievement," BOE Chairman Don Horner said.
That leaves only two high schools — Kalaheo and Kailua — next year that will need waivers because their schedules fall short of the requirement.
Under the law, passed in the wake of teacher Furlough Fridays, all elementary schools since last school year have had to provide at least five hours and five minutes of instruction on average each day for a total of 915 hours a year.
Increasing instructional time across elementary schools, DOE officials said, was less challenging because those students have a single class, while middle, intermediate and high school students have multiple classes and individualized schedules.
The law increases the required learning time to an average of at least six hours of instructional time a day for elementary and secondary schools — or 1,080 hours per year — starting with the 2016-17 school year. Charter and multitrack schools are exempt.
