For the next two years, classes will start before Labor Day. The first day of the 2026-27 school year will be Tuesday, Sept. 1, and the 2027-28 school year will start on Tuesday, Aug. 31.
Over the summer of 2025, the scheduling team decided to change the calendar because, in 2026 and 2027, Labor Day takes place later in September than it has in previous years.
The scheduling team consists of the three divisional principals, Assistant Head for Teaching and Learning Debby Previna and Assistant Head for Equity and Inclusion Marlo Thomas.
According to Interim High School Principal Chris Levy, the previous calendar met the Association of Independent Maryland and D.C. Schools’ requirement of 170 school days per year. But, if classes were to start after Labor Day this year and in 2027, the school would have to cut days from winter and spring breaks to continue to meet the requirement. Instead, the change will add about three days to the school year while leaving the same amount of time for winter and spring break.
Levy said members of the scheduling team discussed whether to add days at the end of the school year, but the team ultimately decided against doing so. “Folks are so accustomed to being done at the end of the first week [of June],” Levy said. “We didn’t believe that we would get a lot of value extending three days beyond that.”
Chief of Staff Lauren Dickert said the scheduling team sent a survey to faculty before making the decision and received mostly positive feedback. Dickert said that after the school announced the change in a Nov. 14 email, several parents emailed back to share positive feedback. Dickert declined to share any details of their responses.
“I was really surprised; my initial reaction was negative,” Alison Comly, a parent of a freshman and a junior, said. “Labor Day really signifies the end of summer, and I think families and extended families sometimes get together or get together with friends. I think it’s nice to have that [Labor Day] weekend before school starts,” she said.
“For me, it was a good idea,” history teacher Kim Nyguen said. “I’m from Arizona, where starting in August is pretty normal. I’ve worked at international schools; they all start in the middle of August. So for me, coming to GDS and D.C., starting after break seems very late.”
Sophomore Zoe Wolin was initially against the idea of starting classes earlier. But she said that, knowing the scheduling team had to cut break days, she’d “rather [start classes earlier] than have my winter break be shorter.”
With the calendar update, Labor Day weekend will last four days, from Friday to Monday.
Although the long weekend will cut into the first Friday of the school year, Levy said First Friday programming is still scheduled to run. “Quinn [Killy] and I are still finalizing it, but it would certainly still happen,” Levy said. Levy said one possibility is that First Friday festivities could instead run on the first in-school Friday, which would take place during the second week of school.
Levy said the programming for activities that take place before classes begin, such as preseason training and class trips, “should run roughly the same.” Because the 2025-26 school year began on Sept. 2, Levy said next year’s start, which is just a day earlier, will not have much of an impact on the activities that take place before school starts.
Nyguen said he preferred the new calendar because the added learning days allow him to assign the same amount of work over a longer period of time, making his class schedule less cramped.
“I kind of had suspected for a few years that we would adapt [the start date] at some point,” history teacher Anthony Belber said. “I know some of the other D.C.-area schools have already moved up their start dates, so I wasn’t surprised.”
“We went through a similar change two years ago,” Ashley Mattoon, who is a parent of a GDS senior and a science teacher at the National Cathedral School (NCS), said. “So I kind of thought, ‘Oh, that’s interesting. GDS is doing what we did two years ago,’ and it seems to have worked out pretty well at NCS.”
Mattoon said that after the calendar change at NCS, she felt like school could get into a flow earlier in the year. With the updated calendar, “you can truly begin delving into your coursework without concerns about interruptions or distractions over things that happen at the beginning of the year that are unique to that time of year,” she said.
“Initially, I think I was definitely sad; it felt like summer was being cut into,” science teacher Cori Coats said. “For the faculty, it felt like it was just a little bit of a shift in terms of more formal responsibility that would be starting earlier.”
According to Dickert and Levy, GDS could revert to the previous calendar in years when Labor Day takes place earlier in September.