The Mehlville Board of Education approved the district’s 2023-2024 academic calendar at the board’s meeting Dec. 15.

The first day of the 2023-2024 school year is Tuesday, Aug. 22, and the last day of the school year is tentatively scheduled for Wednesday, May 29, 2024.

Each year, a committee of several dozen teachers, parents, community members, support staff and district administration meet to develop the calendar before submitting it to the board for final approval.

The 2023-2024 calendar has 1,044 hours of student attendance, which equates to roughly 174 days of school, said Assistant Superintendent of Teaching and Learning Brian Smith.

The calendar includes 36 makeup hours built-in in the case of inclement weather. There are 182 contracted workdays for staff, including three and a half self-directed teacher workdays.

“We did a ThoughtExchange … to elicit input from the community … we had a little over 1,300 participants. That ranged from our students, to our employees to our families and parents overall,” Smith said. “There’s no pleasing

everyone. Many times there’s pleasing very few. There was a lot of compromising and negotiating that went into the process and this was a calendar the committee unanimously said they could live with in terms of implementation.”

The first day of class, Aug. 22, is just about the earliest any district can start, after the state legislature passed a law in 2019 that bars the first day of school from being any earlier than 10 days before Labor Day weekend, in order to promote summer tourism in the state.

“I did go through the calendar and the results of the survey … and you certainly hit on the top of the most heavily-weighted choices,” Board President Peggy Hassler said.

“It was the first time the committee had to go to a third meeting, so we spent some extra time on it,” Smith replied.