Annual School Calendar Submission Guidance
Copies of board approved school calendars and bell schedules (including for homeschool programs) for the next school year are due annually to CSI by May 15th. If that date falls on a weekend, then plan to submit the Friday before.
For questions or support, please email submissions_CSI@csi.state.co.us. Calendars, bell schedules, and completed Summary Sheets should be sent by attachment to this same email address.
The Data Submissions Team uses the annual school calendar submission:
- to ensure that minimum instructional hour requirements are met by each grade level.
- as supporting documentation required for the October Count Audit.
IMPORTANT: If your annual calendar changes after the submission date, you must submit a revised version to CSI so we can update our records and recalculate calendar days and instructional hours to ensure compliance.
Please use the following resources as you develop your calendar:
- CDE Calendar and Instructional Hours Guidance (the most important guidance to understand and follow)
- Part III, I. School Calendar in the CSI Attendance Guidance document on the CSI website.
- CDE October Count Audit Guide in Appendix C has an example calendar and example bell schedules that we recommend modeling as much as you can.
Any additional detail you add is a plus for anyone outside of your school to understand. Detailed information helps to make instructional time calculations much faster for our office and for CDE during their audit, resulting in less back and forth on clarifying questions.
Bell schedules are required (usually 6th grade and up) if you have varying class periods throughout the day, typically with passing minutes between each period. Details such as grade levels, days of the week, blocks, period start/end times, passing minutes must be clearly shown in each bell schedule submitted. They must also clearly crosswalk to student schedules in your SIS.
At a minimum, please clearly indicate on your calendars (preferred) or on an accompanying document:
- Indicate which days are/are not student contact days (please include a total number of contact days be each month and a grand total somewhere on the calendar)
- Use colored cells when possible along with a legend on types of days
- Show holidays/breaks and teacher professional development days
- For special event days, be sure to indicate if students attend and if attendance is required and the day considered to be instructional
- First and last days of the school year (student start and end days)
- Clearly indicate all early release days
- If you have a home school program, you must provide a separate home school calendar
- We strongly encourage you to add 2-3 extra days for unexpected closures (i.e., add them at the end of the year and release early if you don’t use them)
- Add a revision date to the calendar itself in case you have multiple modifications during they year (not including this date has created frustrating problems with using out of date calendar versions in the past, so please include this!)
- Other items to include: School year and school name
Ideally, please include in your bell schedules:
- Provide a bell schedule for your elementary grades if you have it; otherwise, be sure to include start/stop and lunch times (by days of the week if those vary)
- For middle school and high school, list each period with the start and stop times along with the total minutes of each (periods need to clearly cross walk to student schedules generated from your SIS)
- Provide separate schedules if periods differ by day of the week or by grade level (clearly label with days met)
- Indicate lunch periods and passing time between class periods
- Schedules for postsecondary option classes are also required
Remote Options:
Summary Sheet:
Each CSI school will need to once again complete this document and provide it along with the submission of their calendar and bell schedules. The summary sheet with embedded instructions is at Calendar Bell Summary Sheet. There is also a completed example file available to download on that same page.