Her younger children attend a private Catholic school that likely will remain on the traditional three-month summer schedule.

“It’s logistically a little bit of a mess for people like me,” Holden said. “To some degree, parents need to buck up and just deal with it, but there certainly are parents out there who will be inconvenienced.”

Holden is not alone in the inconvenience as the calendar will be shaken up for 40,000 Oklahoma City schoolchildren.

“We want to get out and really give parents 71/2 months to adjust, because this is a change,” Superintendent Karl Springer said Monday night before the school board approved the change.

Holden said for her the challenge will be finding child care for her two younger children when her 13-year-old daughter, who often baby-sits her siblings, returns to school on Aug. 1.

“I can understand why the district went that way. I can get the idea of retention over the summer,” Holden said. “From a purely selfish perspective, it has messed me up.”

The logistics

The district will reach out to external agencies that serve Oklahoma City students like Metro Technology Centers, The Boys and Girls Clubs, summer camp programs and athletics programs, Springer said.

Tammy Coffee, youth and family director of the downtown branch of the YMCA, said her organization is not certain yet how the decision will affect its programs b ut added it’s ready to make adjustments.

“It’s just more of us getting together with the schools to make sure our kids are taken care of,” Coffee said. “I think that in the long run, it will be a good thing.”

Metro Technology officials have been watching this issue simmer on the back burner for a while now waiting for the district to turn up the heat, spokesman Brian Ruttman said.

“We’ve watched it as they’ve piloted in some of the schools,” Ruttman said. “We do support their decision to move into that calendar … We’ll make adjustments internally to make sure that it is as seamless as possible.”

A growing trend

Other metro-area districts will watch how the calendar works for Oklahoma City, but none are lining up to be second for the shift.

Putnam City schools Superintendent Paul Hurst said he fully supports Oklahoma City’s decision, but for his district to head in that direction would require a lot of ground work.

“It makes perfect academic sense. Research has shown that 12 weeks off in the summer is harmful to learning,” Hurst said in a prepared statement. “I applaud them.”

Brenda Lyons, associate superintendent of Edmond Public Schools, said the calendar committee just concluded its work for next year, and a shorter summer was not considered and has not come up in conversations for the future.

“We’ll be most interested to see the results of it and how it impacts student learning,” Lyons said.

Ben Lummis, vice president of the National Center on Time and Learning, said the key will be for the Oklahoma City district to utilize the inte rsession breaks to create high-quality additional classroom time for students in need of remediation.

“They’ll need to be well targeted to the students who need it, who need improvement, and hopefully it will have enrichment for those kids who do well, too,” Lummis said.

The three Santa Fe South Charter Schools in Oklahoma City have been using a calendar similar to Oklahoma City’s newly adopted program for years, Superintendent Chris Brewster said.

“We are actually looking at changing ours because eight weeks of summer is still too much down time for us,” Brewster said. “We have almost two weeks more instructional time in and a longer school day.”

Charter schools will have the option of adopting the district’s new calendar but do not have to.