The school year just got shorter for Kingfisher Public Schools students and faculty.

But not until next year.

The Kingfisher Board of Education on Monday unanimously approved the 2022-23 school calendar during its regular February meeting.

The move came at the recommendation of Superintendent Dr. Daniel Craig as well as a large majority of teachers who voted in favor of the one presented to the board.

“It’s a different calendar than we’ve had,” Craig said. “It’s a big change.”

The biggest change is the number of days students will be in school.

That number is dropping from 173 to 165.

Schools have the option of calculating the length of school years by hours instead of days, which Kingfisher has done for a number of years and again voted Monday to continue to do so.

A district must have 1,080 hours to complete the year. Of that, 30 hours can be set aside for professional development and 12 hours can be used for parent-teacher conferences.

Kingfisher annually has far exceeded the 1,080 hours, which, among other things, has made it easier to absorb snow days such as those missed last week.

However, there are drawbacks, Craig said.

“One of the things I’m told when talking with teachers we lose is that they can go somewhere else and make the same amount of money and work fewer days,” Craig said. “This allows us to be more competitive.”

Craig told the board the new calendar gets the district more in line with the likes of Cashion, Okarche, Hennessey and Lomega.

Built in to the new calendar are virtual/teacher collaboration days, during which students won’t be in school.

There is one a month from September through May with the exception of January.

Kingfisher’s transition to a professional learning community (or PLC) approach to education necessitates frequent meetings among teachers to allow them to collaborate.

“There’s just no time for that right now,” Craig said.

Most of those days will be Fridays.

However, beginning in April of 2023, there will be no school on Fridays. The virtual days those months (April 6 and May 4) are Thursdays.

Dana Golbek, president of the board, asked teachers attending the meeting if the reduced number of instructional days would constrict their teaching.

Janet Pennington, who teaches math, including AP calculus, at the high school, said there was some concern for her AP courses due to the time constraint of getting everything taught prior to the end-of-year AP test.

However, she added, the concern wasn’t as great for non-AP courses.

The teachers on hand also were in unison in saying being out of school on Fridays in the spring wouldn’t be a big change because the large number of student and teacher/coach absences due to spring activities had already reduced instruction on those days.

Board member Jim Perdue asked if consideration was given to parents who have to find day care for the extra days.

Melody Kuehn, a science teacher at the middle school, was one of the teachers on the committee that drafted the school calendars.

She told board members that a number of different scenarios were discussed and considered before presenting the calendars. The one presented, she said, best survived the committee’s scrutiny.

“There are a lot of teachers who are also parents who were on the committee,” she said. “We all played devil’s advocate to try to punch holes in all of the scenarios.”

Perdue also wanted to ensure students would receive breakfast and lunch on the virtual days.

Craig assured him that would be the case.

Also at the meeting, the board accepted the resignations of Jay Wood and Gayla Sykes.

Sykes is a paraprofessional at Gilmour Elementary. Her family is moving and her resignation is effective immediately.

Wood, the KHS principal and athletic director, was voted in December 2021 to become the new superintendent at Dover School.

Wood’s resignation is effective June 30.

He started in KHS as a girls basketball coach and teacher, later transitioned to AD and assistant principal and is now in his first year in his current role.

“I want to thank you for the opportunity to grow as an educator,” he wrote in his resignation letter. “Having been a graduate of Kingfisher High School, with two parents that were exceptional educators in KPS, it is with a heavy heart and sleepless nights that I am writing this letter.”

Wood said the opportunity to become a superintendent was too difficult to pass up.

“I have loved every minute at Kingfisher and was very excited and proud of where we were going as a high school. I looked forward to the challenges it presented and the way my staff was attacking those challenges.”

The board approved four new hires: Jennifer Dean and Nicole Snow as Heritage paraprofessionals, Katherine Winter as a Gilmour paraprofessional and Laura Padilla as a teacher’s assistant at the high school.