Downingtown students will keep their spring break this year, but they will be staying in school four days longer in June.
As classes resumed yesterday in the Downingtown Area School District after a nine-day strike, district officials released a tentative revised school calendar making up the lost days.
Parents expressed relief that the strike had ended.
Teachers are scheduled to vote on the tentative agreement next Friday in each of the district's 13 schools, union officials said. The school board will vote after the teachers' ratification. Both sides are keeping mum about the terms of the pact until they both have voted on it.
The tentative calendar released by the district yesterday calls for students to make up seven missed days. Teacher training days scheduled for next Friday and April 25 would become regular instruction days instead. Feb. 18, Presidents' Day, which had been a holiday, would become a school day, and the school year would be extended from June 9 to June 13.
Graduation ceremonies at the two high schools would be pushed back a week, to June 12 at Downingtown East High School and June 13 at Downingtown West High School. The school board must still ratify the proposed schedule; that will likely happen at a meeting Wednesday.
"I think it's a wonderful thing that the strike is over, and the kids are going back," said Jack Darnell, the father of a junior at Downingtown East High School. "My main concern has been for the students; they've been manipulated by both sides - pawns in a bigger battle."
Wages were the main point of dispute as the strike began. The 850 striking teachers said they were not being paid as much as their colleagues at other high-performing Chester County districts. The school board responded that residents wanted fiscal restraint. They pointed to the expense of building a third middle school and high school in the rapidly growing 11,730-student district, Chester County's largest.
As the strike went on, the wage issues were resolved, but others, including whether to make up teacher training days that would be canceled in favor of student makeup days, kept the strike going.