Public schools will no longer be required to tally the number of "instructional" minutes students receive throughout the school year under revisions made to a 2010 law that mandates minimum learning time.
Under Senate Bill 822, which Gov. David Ige signed into law Thursday, the term "instructional hours" in Act 167 has been replaced with "student hours," meaning learning time will now apply to any time that students are in school, a change supported by the teachers union, which viewed the original law as an unfunded mandate.
The instructional time requirements were imposed in the wake of Furlough Fridays, which resulted in Hawaii having the shortest school year in the country.
The challenge for schools had been in complying with minimum instructional hours without exceeding teachers’ contracted seven-hour workday and other contractual requirements such as teacher planning time and "duty-free" lunch breaks.
The seemingly small change is expected to relieve schools of having to account for every minute that students are in a traditional classroom setting.
Without it "our schools would still be tinkering with bell schedules rather than focusing on creating student opportunities and enhancing classroom time," Joan Lewis, vice president and teacher lobbyist for the Hawaii State Teachers Association, said in a statement.
Previously, instructional hours were defined under law as time when students were "engaged in learning activities including regularly scheduled instruction and learning assessments within the curriculum." It discounted lunch, recess and between-class time. That definition has been eliminated.
The law now defines student hours as "inclusive of the full school day in alignment with the state’s general learner outcomes."
The Department of Education’s general learner outcomes, known as GLOs, are six overarching goals to ensure students in all grade levels are self-directed learners, complex thinkers, community contributors, effective communicators, quality producers and effective and ethical users of technology.
"This legislation is the culmination of many years of discussion around how to ensure our children’s educational achievement is attained," Ige said in a statement.
The law still requires schools to have at least 180 instructional days a year — a requirement schools have been meeting for several years and a mandate seen as a safeguard against a repeat of Furlough Fridays.
The HSTA for several years had sought an outright repeal, arguing that any increase to instructional time should be collectively bargained for with increased compensation and not mandated in statute.
The original law, Act 167, has required elementary schools for the past two years to provide 915 instructional hours a year, or an average of five hours and five minutes of instruction daily. Middle and high schools starting this school year were required to provide 990 hours a year, or an average of five hours and 30 minutes of instruction per day.
Act 167 included an increase to an average of six hours of instruction a day for a total of 1,080 hours a year for all schools starting with the 2016-17 school year. That requirement remains. Union and school officials testified during the legislative session that the increase would be attainable with the new definition of student hours.
Before the mandate there was a difference of as much as 220 hours per year among some secondary Hawaii schools. That amounted to some students getting up to six fewer hours of classroom time per week than their peers.
In previous years public schools had been between 178 and 180 days, except during furloughs in 2009-10, when the school year dipped to 163 days.
