Additional Days School Year
What Is It?
The Additional Days School Year provides elementary schools with funding to provide up to 30 additional half-days of instruction to enhance teacher pay, mitigate pandemic-related learning loss, and prevent summer slide for students who tend to lose some of the achievement gains they made during the previous school year. The effects of the global pandemic on learning loss has increased and accelerated the number of school systems exploring implementation of this program.
TEA identified three potential models for school systems looking to implement ADSY:
- Option 1 – Voluntary Summer Learning: A base 180 day calendar and up to 30 days of summer programming for a targeted subset of students.
- Option 2 – Intersessional Calendar: A base calendar of 180 days with up to 30 additional days interspersed over the full year for accelerated learning and enrichment with a subset of students.
- Option 3 – Full Year Redesign: A revamped 210 day calendar and revised daily schedules to increase time for teacher planning and collaboration and student enrichment and breaks during the school day.
Our Impact
The Texas Impact Network has supported 15 regionally diverse school systems to build additional instructional time for students into their school calendars in 2021-2022. The support is provided through the statewide ADSY Planning and Execution program in collaboration with the Texas Education Agency, as well as direct support in a small number of large, urban systems.
ADSY Planning and Execution Program
The Texas Impact Network partners with the Texas Education Agency to run the ADSY Planning and Execution Program (PEP). The ADSY PEP is a competitive grant program offering planning and execution supports for school systems interested in implementing either the Voluntary Summer Learning or Full Year Redesign models.
All systems receive planning year grants and technical assistance from The Learning Agenda to design and implement a plan for extending the school year for elementary students. Thirteen school systems in the first cycle implemented in the 2021-2022 school year. The second cycle includes 60 school systems working on the Voluntary Summer Learning model and 20 school systems working on the Full Year Redesign model. These districts will spend the 2021-2022 school year designing programs to implement in 2022-2023.
Broad and Diverse Support
The ADSY PEP Program is accessible to any school system in the state of Texas. Additionally, with assistance from the Texas Impact Network, Dallas ISD approved Intersessional and Full Year Redesign calendars and engaged staff and families to opt in to participating in the new models. Forty-one campuses have opted into the intersessional calendar and five campuses have opted into the full year redesign, representing a total of 23,295 students receiving increased instructional time.
The Network also helped Uplift Education implement a new summer learning model and hopes to expand direct ADSY support to school systems in other major urban areas.
The 15 school systems currently implementing the program through support from the Texas Impact Network span the state and range from Dallas ISD serving 157,000 students to the Betty M Condra School serving 64 students.
The Texas Impact Network is grateful for the generous support from The Wallace Foundation to grow the number of school systems implementing research-backed summer learning strategies.
