Desert Sands work group favors August start but parents, classified staff raise concerns about process and heat mitigation

Dan Borgen, the district’s director of personnel and leadership development, reported to the Desert Sands Unified School District Board of Education on a multi-stakeholder instructional calendar work group convened this spring and summer to gather input ahead of the joint DSUSD–DSTA calendar committee. The work group of 47 people included two trustees, two association presidents, 24 certificated staff, nine classified staff and 13 parents, and met four times to produce preferred calendar options and a short survey of participants.

The work group’s stated constraints included the district requirement of 180 instructional days, recognition of national holidays and contract provisions for two teacher prep days and two professional-development days. Borgen said the work group’s top conclusions were consistency year to year, consideration of moving at least one professional-development day to just before the start of school and an earlier spring break; participants’ strongest single preference in the group survey was starting school in August with PD days before students return. “Starting the August seemed consistent among the group,” Borgen said, and the group’s materials showed many participants recommended moving PD days to before school begins.

Trustee Porras, who served on the work group, pressed staff on participation and process, saying the first meeting included few nonstaff parents and that some parents and classified employees felt excluded by meeting times. “When you have 33 people and 4 of them are non staff members, … we didn't break down the barriers in order to appreciate and have [parents] present,” Porras said. She told the board she would provide a more detailed breakdown of parent versus staff attendance by meeting and urged the calendar committee to factor parent and classified-staff concerns into its work.

Porras and other speakers also flagged two substantive issues: disputed heat-mitigation data used in the work-group materials, and operational impacts on classified employees when severe-heat mitigation forces students into multipurpose rooms. Porras said participants were given a handout showing that starting mid‑August produced fewer heat-mitigation days than later starts; she said that analysis was limited to the first two weeks before and after school start dates and later secured a broader six-week dataset that changed the picture. Borgen acknowledged the narrower dataset had been used in some materials and said he would provide the broader data to trustees and to the calendar committee: “I have them pull the first 6 weeks… I have that data, and I'll share that for sure in the Friday letter.”

Classified staff who joined later in the process told trustees they experienced higher workload and physical strain on consecutive heat-mitigation days. A yard supervisor and janitorial staff reported louder, longer indoor days with students eating and doing recess in multipurpose rooms and said they frequently left work with headaches; one janitor reported larger amounts of wasted hot food in August. Board members said those operational details should weigh heavily on calendar decisions.

Board members and site leaders also discussed scheduling choices the work group debated, including staggered starts (secondary earlier, elementary later), moving some winter or Thanksgiving days to February, aligning with CIF and College of the Desert calendars for athletics and dual-enrollment, and clustering or spacing heat-mitigation days. Several trustees emphasized meeting time accessibility for parents and employees and recommended evening or multiple-time meetings for future engagement.

Borgen said the next step is to present the work-group materials, dot-matrix charts and the full participant feedback to the joint calendar committee and that he will share corrected heat-mitigation data with the committee and trustees. There was no formal board action to adopt a calendar at the Sept. 16 meeting; the item was presented for information and for direction to the calendar committee.

Speakers on the record included the presenter, Dan Borgen, and board members who asked questions and commented on process and substance: Trustee Porras, Trustee Pierce, Trustee Alvarez, Trustee Duran and Trustee Perez. The presentation included the work-group survey results, participant counts and multiple draft calendar scenarios considered by participants.