With the school year soon coming to an end, Powell kids are just about to go on spring break.

The week-long break coincides with Easter, but with the holiday in late April this year, it’s creating some anxiety in the schools.

“In some years, connecting spring break to Easter would be fine. … In other years, it directly falls within the [state] testing window,” said Jay Curtis, superintendent of Park County School District No. 1.

The testing window opens this week, kids go on spring break next week, then testing will resume the following week.

When the school district adopted the calendar last year, Curtis said leaders would need to be reflective and flexible if there were “any glaring defects” with it.

“Those are defects that really are hard to see until you’re living in the calendar,” Curtis said.

Powell educators worry the week-long break could have an effect on the Wyoming Test of Proficiency and Progress (WY-TOPP), which is given to students in third grade through 10th grade each spring.

Kids will only have about three and a half weeks left of the school year following spring break.

Curtis said district leaders looked at possible ways to reschedule next year’s spring break so it wouldn’t be connected to Easter.

“The first goal was to get spring break into March somehow,” he said.

They settled on scheduling spring break for March 16-20 (instead of April 13-17, as had been originally planned).

There was some talk about moving it a week earlier to coincide with the state basketball tournament, scheduled for March 12-14.

However, that would mean students who play basketball wouldn’t get a break, Curtis said.

“Breaks are important — having a break to recharge the batteries is as important for those basketball kids as it is for everybody else,” he said, adding that it “would be a disservice to a fairly large group of students and parents.”

Students will still get a break at Easter next year, with no school on Good Friday (April 10) and the following Monday (April 13).

Curtis had hoped to align Powell schools’ spring break with Northwest College’s; with both organizations employing hundreds of people in Powell — and some PHS students attending classes at NWC — he said it would be a really good thing for the community if the breaks were scheduled together.

However, due to various conflicts, “we couldn’t get them matched up this [coming] year,” Curtis said.

“President Hicswa and I did kind of do a pinky shake that next year when they’re doing their planning, that we would also do our planning … and hopefully get our spring breaks finally aligned,” he said.

The Powell school board initially approved a 2019-20 calendar in December, and gave the green light to the revised version last week, as a few days had to be shuffled. School will start one day earlier — on Aug. 26 — but will still end on May 28, as originally planned.

With switching a professional development day in January, students will actually get a longer Christmas break, with the last day of classes Dec. 20 and not returning until Jan. 6.

The revised version seemed to be well-received among administrators and other staff, Curtis said.

“I think the changes are good,” he said. “Again, we won’t know until we try it for a year.”

Curtis told the board that no calendar is perfect.

“It really doesn’t matter what you do — it’s never going to be perfect,” he said. “But I think this is about as close to it as we can get for our district at this point in time.”