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Students in Saskatchewan will be spending more time in the classroom starting from the next school year, after the Ministry of Education introduced a mandatory 950 instructional hours per year for all school divisions.

"That amounts to 190 days of instructional time and seven days of non-instructional time," said Education Minister Russ Marchuk. "School divisions have scope to alter that as they see fit and as they see best fits the needs of their communities. School year calendars will be developed by school divisions in consultation with their local teachers' associations and with their School Community Councils, and community members are invited in as well. Those considerations will all be given due consideration."

For many school divisions, the addition of more instructional hours could result in a longer school day. In the Chinook School Division, the new mandate adds about 50 hours of classroom time per year.

Full interview with Liam Choo-Foo

"You'll see some minor fluctuations, but we're around 900 hours," said Director of Education Liam Choo-Foo. "If you break this down into our calendar, we're looking at 184 instructional days next year, it equates to about 10 minutes a day."

School divisions have a deadline of May 1st to submit their calendars for the next school year. Choo-Foo says they're well on their way to determine the days when the schools will be open, but have some work to do yet before determining how long each school day will be.

"As you know we have a number of schools that have buses involved and a number of them feed into other schools, so we have some logistics that we have to work with," he added. "We're hoping that the length of the day doesn't change a lot, and we can find some time throughout the course of the day through noon hours or warning bells or areas like that to generate the extra 10 minutes."

Choo-Foo adds the school division will meet with the Education Ministry in the next few weeks to get more details, but in the meantime, he believes more instructional time could be beneficial.

"If student achievement was priority number one, as was outlined in 'Vision 2020', having more useful time in front of students for instruction, I think, will be beneficial," he added.