Richmond Public Schools is asking teachers to weigh in on whether and when teacher workdays should be added to next year’s school calendar. 

The survey can be found here and can only be accessed by people with an RPS email. It will be open until Wednesday, Oct. 16. 

Draft calendars drawn up by Superintendent Jason Kamras’ administration for the division’s traditional and 200-day school years would include a half-day teacher workday between the two semesters in January and conclude the school year for students on May 29. 

But teachers, in both comments to the School Board and responses on an anonymous survey conducted by Richmond Public Schools, have asked for more teacher workdays — days that students have off so teachers can catch up on planning and administrative work.

Having only a single half-workday in the annual calendar “is especially challenging for secondary teachers that have different prep second semester,” Anne Forrester, the vice president of the Richmond Education Association, the local teachers union, told the School Board Monday. 

The RPS surveys also produced calls for more teacher workdays, but the response rate was low, with only 118 replies about the traditional calendar and 38 regarding the 200-day calendar. Not all of those respondents replied to every question, and the survey design didn’t identify whether the person responding was a teacher, staff member, parent or community member. 

7th District member Cheryl Burke said Monday that she wouldn’t vote in favor of a calendar that only provided a single half-day for teacher planning, but the board appeared uncertain about the best way to add the time to the schedule, leading to the proposal for a targeted survey. 

“I don’t want to make any decisions before they’ve been run by the teachers,” said 5th District member Stephanie Rizzi.

Tradeoffs

On Monday night, Kamras presented the choice largely as a tradeoff between adding teacher workdays and keeping the last day of school May 29. Pushing the last day into June, he warned, “is going to hurt our chronic absenteeism rates,” as many children would likely not attend. 

3rd District member Kenya Gibson said she had “some hesitation regarding putting a teacher request as kind of a decision on pushing out the school year, which no one will like.” 

“This is not putting the teachers in a good position,” she said. 

Kamras replied that “respectfully, I think the board needs to make a hard decision.”

“I think there are good alternatives, but we can’t have everything,” he said. “And this isn’t about pitting teachers against kids or families. It’s frankly about math. There’s only so many days.” 

But despite discussion over scheduling the last day of school at the Monday meeting, the survey being distributed to teachers offers five options that all preserve the May 29 last day. 

Alyssa Schwenk, a spokesperson for Richmond Public Schools, said the options were crafted in light of “the Board’s clear desire to not move into the first week of June.” 

“Each meets the threshold for number of instructional hours from the state; many of them just do have the instructional trade-off of one fewer day with students ahead of spring 2026 state tests,” she wrote in an email. 

The five scenarios being put before teachers include: 

• A full teacher workday on Jan. 14, with a last day of May 29 for both students and teachers
• A full teacher workday on Jan. 14, with a last day of May 29 for students and June 1 for teachers 
• Full teacher workdays on both Jan. 14 and Jan. 15, with a last day of May 29 for students and June 2 for teachers
• Full teacher workday on Nov. 3 (replacing an existing Wellness Day), with a last day of May 29 for students and June 1 for teachers
• Half teacher workdays on Jan. 14 and May 29, with a last day of May 29 for students and June 1 for teacher

Wellness Days are days off for both students and staff that the division began offering during the pandemic to address employee mental health. The calendar proposed by the administration Monday includes two, on Nov. 3 and Feb. 16.

In response to questions about snow day time from 2nd District member Mariah White Monday, RPS Chief Engagement Officer Danielle Greene-Bell said the RPS schedules greatly exceed the 990 hours of teaching time mandated by state law. The traditional calendar that has been proposed by the administration has 1,396 instructional hours, while the 200-day calendar has 1,556 hours, she said.

State-mandated training

The Monday meeting also saw some teacher concerns about the current year’s calendar.

Katherine Franzel, a first-grade teacher at Westover Hills Elementary, told the board many teachers are facing more than 30 hours of mandatory training under the Virginia Literacy Act, a state law aimed at increasing students’ ability to read. 

“RPS needs a comprehensive plan to compensate teachers or provide additional time within our contract hours for us to complete the remainder of these required training modules,” said Franzel. 

Teachers in Hanover, Henrico and Chesterfield counties, she said, are compensating teachers for the additional training time, while those in Arlington, Fairfax and Loudoun counties as well as the city of Roanoke are granting teachers additional time to complete the training through days off or adjustments to the start or end of the day.