Opinion ID: 2288016
Heading Depth: 1
Heading Rank: 12

Heading: Scheduling and Length of School Vacations and of the Commencement and Ending of the School Year

Text: On similar reasoning, questions concerned with the scheduling and length of school vacations and the commencement and ending of the school year (insofar as such calendar aspects, respectively, are directed at teacher attendance at school) must be held matters of educational policies and, as such, non-negotiable and beyond the scope of binding arbitration. Here, again, the educational policies predominance arises not merely because of an impingement upon the managerial function of organizing, supervising, directing and distributing personnel but mainly because of a substantial intermixing of judgments transcending teacher interests and embracing important interests of the general citizenry. Since the teaching staff is reasonably to be required to be at school, minimally, whenever the students must attend, the commencement and termination of at least such minimum school year for the teachers, and the scheduling and length of intermediate vacations, will be settled by such calendar arrangements as are to be fixed for student attendance. Into the calendar arrangements for students enter considerations and decisions involving the plans and interests of families, the need to arrange for the presence of all non-teaching personnel who function while students are in attendance at school and the interests and concerns of all other parts of the community related to, or affected by, the times when students will be in attendance at school or on vacation. Thus, the commencement and termination of the school year and the scheduling and length of intermediate vacations during the school year, at least insofar as students and teachers are congruently involved, must be held matters of educational policies bearing too substantially upon too many and important non-teacher interests to be settled by collective bargaining or binding arbitration. The arbitrators exceeded their jurisdiction in purporting to make binding determinations concerning this subject-matter.