Central Texas school district continues unique schedule to close academic achievement gap

LACY-LAKEVIEW, Texas (KWTX) - Most Central Texas school districts with a four-day school week changed their calendars to help with staffing shortages, but Connally ISD said it adjusted its calendar to help struggling students with academic growth.

Students headed back to campus Monday, starting their second year with an ‘intended invention calendar.’ The district said some Friday’s, students and staff are off. Other Friday’s are for morning intervention.

“They can come up to the school for small group, very focused, specific instruction to help them meet their academic goals, make progress towards performance standards on standardized tests, or work on things like enrichment or attendance credit makeup,” Michael Donaldson, Director of Communications for Connally ISD, said.

Donaldson said parents will get a message from their child’s school, notifying parents that their child needs to attend the morning intervention for attendance or academic reasons.

The morning intervention ends at noon, and transportation and meals are provided by the district. He said the goal of the intervention period to help close the gaps.

"We were really looking at ways for us to be able to provide direct, targeted instruction for our students that needed that, he said. “But, when they’re in the same room as 20 other students who are also busy and have their individualized needs, they might fall through the cracks.”

Donaldson said the new schedule has allowed teachers to give more attention to students who are struggling.

“That (the intervention calendar) is allowing us to meet those students and help get them the resources that they need while also providing targeted enrichment opportunities,” he said.

He said the number of students who attend the intervention days varies every week.

“We really try to keep the list as updated as possible to make sure that we are calling in the students that need to be there,” he said.

Even though the district tried this model specifically to help with academic achievement, Donaldson said the district’s STAAR Test results remained the same. However, the district is not taking that as a defeat of its new calendar.

“We’re excited that we didn’t shift the calendar and all of a sudden we saw, ‘Oh, wait, this does not work,’ because if that was the case, we were going to go back to the drawing board,” he said. “But, what the data indicated to us is that this is not a problem, but there’s ways that we can refine it to better suit our students to be able to get that academic growth.”

This year, the district adjusted when the intervention Friday’s will be based on holidays and testing days. Last year, intervention Friday’s alternated every other week.

Based on the district’s 2024-25 calendar, there are 12 “morning intervention” days.

This year, Donaldson added that the district is hoping to track academic growth throughout the year based on these intervention Friday’s.

“We wanted to find a way that we could better accommodate the testing calendar to allow for us to have more specific data points throughout the year to target and track student performance on assessment so that we’re not just relying on the STAAR at the end of the year,” he said.

Similar to other school districts with an adjusted calendar, it also saw an increase with staffing and attendance; however, Donaldson emphasized that the district’s main goal is improving academic achievement and making sure every student is learning what they need to succeed.

Students will begin the ‘intervention’ Friday’s in September.

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