East St. Louis 189 is considering extending the school year. What would it cost?

The superintendent of East St. Louis School District 189 is advocating that the district extend its school year more than a month, and anticipates pressing for extended school calendars each of the next two summers as well.

Superintendent Art Culver wrote in a letter to district families and staff that the plan to move the last day of school from May 26 to June 30 would require the agreement of the teachers union and approval from the school board.

“We have many students who are in jeopardy of not graduating or advancing to the next grade level without extended academic support,” he wrote. “ … The extended time will allow younger students to extend learning and fill learning gaps that resulted from this year’s shorter school days.”

Director of Communications Sydney Stigge-Kaufman said in an email last Wednesday that the administration is in discussion with union leadership about extending the school year. She did not answer whether there was a plan to bring a proposal to the school board or whether there was a deadline for the decision to be made.

The East St. Louis Federation of Teachers has not respond to a private message sent through social media Friday.

Stigge-Kaufman did not respond to requests to interview Culver on Tuesday.

Through the American Rescue Plan, the district will receive $78,670,909 in federal funding to use over the next three and a half years. At least 20% of the funding must be used to address learning loss. If the district ends up extending the school year, that would qualify.

A new resource guide from the Illinois P-20 Council — an agency created in 2009 to study and make recommendations for education — includes extending either the school day or school year as one of 12 priority topic areas to inform spending decisions. The Illinois State Board of Education, the Governor’s Office of Early Childhood Development and several other state education agencies helped develop the guide.

The guide estimates that adding three weeks to the school year would cost a district between $400 and $600 per student per year to cover salaries for additional time, facility and support costs, negotiations and communicating with parents.

With 5,209 students enrolled in District 189 in 2020, that total would be between $2,083,600 and $3,017,400.

Even at the high end of the P-20 Council’s cost estimations, East St. Louis’s $78,670,909 from the American Rescue Plan could easily cover an additional six weeks for the next three years.

Compared to the rest of southwest Illinois, East St. Louis 189 was slower to bring students back to in-person learning. Culver consistently pointed to the large number of St. Clair County’s COVID-19 cases occurring within the ZIP codes the district serves. Nearly 100% of the district’s students are considered low-income, and more than 97% are Black — both groups were disproportionately affected by the pandemic nationally.

Students in preschool through fifth grade have been in-person five days a week since early march. Beginning Wednesday, the district will brought back some of its older students in for five full days a week.