The Chicago Teachers Union will consider waiving provisions of its contract to allow high schools to experiment with longer class periods and fewer study halls, a union spokesman said Friday.
But both the union and the Chicago Principals Association said that significant expansion of opportunities for Chicago students to take more courses rather than padding their schedules with study halls would mean hiring more teachers.
”To give students more teaching time, you have to hire more teachers, there is no way around it,” said Bruce Berndt, president of the principals association.
Chuck Burdeen, a union spokesman, said that although teachers might agree to teach more than 200 minutes of their day, they would have to be paid more for it. But contract provisions might be waived to go to 50-minute rather than 40-minute periods if teachers still were given enough time to prepare for classes and grade assignments and tests.
”We are talking with our union delegates in high schools now to see how these plans might be implemented,” Burdeen said. ”We are looking at an array of approaches to expand the array of offerings. But the teachers would have to be involved in planning it and committed to doing it, or it wouldn`t work.”
State School Supt. Ted Sanders has directed his staff to look at ways of redefining the school day to stop Chicago from padding students` schedules with two and three study halls a day to meet the state-required 300 minutes of instruction.
In the past, Chicago high schools have given students nonexistent first-and last-period study halls with no room assigned and no teachers. Under state pressure, that problem is being corrected by creating ”real” study halls, but even those shortchange students in comparison with many suburban students.
