Get Full Government Meeting Transcripts, Videos, & Alerts Forever!
Get email alerts on the School Calendar topic
No spam. Unsubscribe anytime.
Liberty Hill ISD board approves hybrid 2025-26 calendar with Fridays set for teacher time
Summary
After hours of debate focusing on teacher workload, childcare and transportation, trustees approved a hybrid 2025-26 calendar that uses many Fridays for teacher professional time while keeping 160 student days and 187 staff days; board members asked staff to refine Friday expectations before contracts are issued.
The Liberty Hill ISD Board of Trustees voted Feb. 18 to approve a hybrid 2025-26 school calendar designed to create more time for teacher planning and professional development while preserving most instructional requirements.
District staff described the calendar as a compromise between competing preferences. The plan that passed calls for 160 student instructional days and 187 staff days, with teachers starting the year the week of Aug. 4 and students starting Tuesday, Aug. 12. Parts of the school year would use four-day student weeks and five-day staff weeks (Fridays designated for district or campus professional development in the morning and teacher work time in the afternoon).
"This has 160 student days, 187 staff days," the calendar presenter said, summarizing the proposal and how the schedule alternates four- and five-day student weeks across the year to accommodate testing windows and extracurricular travel.
Board deliberations focused on several issues raised repeatedly by parents and staff: whether the change would reduce total instructional minutes, how much extra time would be added to each school day to offset banked days (the approved draft adds about 10 minutes to the instructional day in most weeks), child-care options for families on Fridays, and the district's ability to fill bus-driver and hourly positions.
District staff said they had considered multiple calendar options and surveyed staff and parents; staff acknowledged survey attrition and said principals had reviewed the proposal with their campus teams. The presenter also proposed options for PantherCare and YMCA partnerships to provide Friday childcare, with a drop-in PantherCare rate starting at $50 per day pending final signup numbers.
Trustees asked for more specifics on what Friday professional time would look like on each campus and requested that those expectations be communicated to staff prior to the April contract distribution. Several trustees emphasized that any final implementation must protect guaranteed planning and PLC time for teachers rather than replacing it with unsupervised or purely administrative tasks.
Trustee Kathy Major moved to approve the calendar "as presented with the tweaks to come," and Trustee Kennedy seconded. The board approved the motion by voice vote.
What happens next: District leaders said they will refine and publish campus-specific Friday schedules and start/end times, provide clearer guidance before teacher contracts are issued, and survey families about PantherCare demand to finalize childcare pricing.
