Daniel Jocz doesn’t want to move the calendar start date.

The school board just made Daniel Jocz’s job a lot harder.

Jocz, who is a National Teacher of the Year finalist and the 2016 California State Teacher of the Year, already has to record lectures and give homework to cover five chapters of American history over the summer. He does that so his students can learn everything they need to by the time they take the Smarter Balanced Assessment Consortium tests in April and the Advanced Placement tests in May.

But as LA Unified moves its start date closer to Labor Day, it will ultimately cut into his teaching time before the tests.

“It is going to make my job substantially more difficult,” said the celebrated teacher who has worked at Downtown Magnets High School for 11 years. “We can’t do this as effectively with less instructional time.”

After surveying parents and teachers for months, discussing it for a year and getting input from labor representatives, the LA Unified School board on Tuesday decided to start school a week later, on Aug. 22, next year, and then another week later the following year, on Aug. 28, just before Labor Day.

• Read more: School will start later next year, and Thanksgiving and winter breaks will be shorter

“Late start calendar = LAUSD School Board just cut 3 weeks of instruction for my Advanced Placement students,” tweeted Jocz, who said Wednesday that his fellow teachers are not happy.

“A lot of us in the AP community are taking this very personally and we have our courses planned out,” Jocz said. “Had I known this was pending in this way I would have been more vocal.”

Jocz said the Los Angeles students are a diverse community filled with first-generation Americans and English learners who require more time to become college ready.

“You don’t want students taking tests that they are not ready for, especially if they are the tests that will be used to judge schools and teachers,” Jocz said. He suggested that the nation’s second-largest school district might have the clout to move the testing later in the school year, like to June.

School district officials confirmed that the California Department of Education sets the testing window for SBAC, and AP test dates are set by the College Board, which administers the AP program.

“Scores can go up and down for a variety of reasons and I understand why they want to move the calendar, but it was changed not too long ago and we all adjusted, and graduation and scores increased,” Jocz said, echoing an argument made Tuesday by school board member Monica Garcia.

Dennis Ashendorf, a high school math teacher in the Newport-Mesa Unified School District, starts school after Labor Day, as do a handful of Southern California districts. Of 56 school districts surrounding LA Unified, 50 start school in August.

“The end of a semester is not the end of a course in general in public school,” Ashendorf said Wednesday. “For example, Geometry A is followed by Geometry B. Same stuff. An exam in January works well. There is no great reason not to start school after Labor Day if a little federal help was given.”

August learning isn’t all that fruitful, he said, and the argument that beginning school in the first week of August allows end-of-semester tests before winter break really only makes sense for college, not in K-12 where students usually continue the same English or math course over the whole year.

He added, “What a miserable situation. Sacramento can’t solve it. This is a national problem that only Congress can solve. The benefits are many to us.”

Charter schools, which can set their own calendars, often have earlier start dates. But, as charter school leader Caprice Young, CEO of Magnolia Public Schools, pointed out, “We have so many families who also have children in the LA district schools that we have to keep our schedules pretty much in sync with what they’re doing.”

LA Unified moved its start date to earlier in August four years ago after some elementary schools threatened to become charter schools so they could have more days of instruction, board member Garcia said at Tuesday’s meeting. The schools ended up becoming independent charters and affiliated charters anyway, and students started in early to mid-August.

Meanwhile, at least two labor unions told the board Tuesday that their members didn’t want to change the schedule, and the student school board member spoke out against it. Letetsia Fox of the California School Employees Association representing classified employees and Juan Flecha from the Associated Administrators of Los Angeles representing administrators and principals said their membership didn’t want to change the calendar. The principals had become used to the earlier start, and the classified employees were worried about fewer work hours.

Last year, student board member Leon Popa voiced his concern that a shorter summer makes it harder to land summer internships and that “people make plans and have commitments.” He voted to adopt the one-year plan with the schedule suggested by the superintendent’s staff and, in a recent interview on the district’s TV show “Inside LAUSD’s Student Voice,” he said he felt that School Board President Steve Zimmer followed his lead in voting and listened to his concerns.

A report by Budget Services estimated the cost of shifting the calendar at $134.3 million, but that was based on an estimation that school attendance for the first month would be poor as it is usually at the beginning of the school year. The use of school buildings in August cost an additional $1.4 million in air-conditioning repairs.

Meanwhile, Jocz is trying to figure out how he will teach everything he needs to in the time allotted.

“It’s already challenging the way it is, and moving it forward will present more challenges,” Jocz said. “But we’ll figure out how to face this challenge, as usual, and make it work out.”

Daniel Jocz

Daniel Jocz, a social studies teacher at LA Unified’s Downtown Magnets High School, is among four finalists for the National Teacher of the Year award.

Jocz was one of five winners of the California Teacher of the Year award in October and was nominated for the national competition by the Council of Chief State School Officers (CCSSO), a nonpartisan, nonprofit organization of public officials who head departments of elementary and secondary education in the United States.

“Daniel is a dedicated, passionate, and innovative educator who incorporates popular culture and music in the teaching of history and social studies in a way that engages his students and makes the subjects more accessible while still being rigorous,” said State Superintendent of Public Instruction Tom Torlakson in a press release. “I am so pleased that Daniel is a finalist for this award. He is clearly one of the best teachers in the country.”

Jocz has been a social studies teacher for 11 years, all at his present school, where he is a department chair, instructional leadership team member and associated student body advisor. Jocz is noted for creatively integrating his YouTube page, JoczProductions, into his lessons.

“As a teacher you have the opportunity to prepare students for jobs that haven’t even been created yet, awaken passions students never knew they had, and to inspire them to travel to places they never dreamt they would see,” Jocz said in a statement.

Click here to learn more about Jocz by reading an essay he submitted to CCSSO about his teaching career.

Daniel Jocz

Daniel Jocz, a social studies teacher at Downtown Magnets High School, is one of five people named today by Tom Torlakson, State Superintendent of Public Education, as 2016 California Teachers of the Year.

Jocz is the only winner from LA Unified.

“The teachers we are honoring today are dedicated, energetic, innovative and very effective,” Torlakson said in a statement. “Every day in the classroom they inspire students to learn, excel and realize their full potential. Their work provides a great example for other teachers.”

County offices of education nominated finalists through regional Teachers of the Year competitions. A state selection committee reviewed the applications and conducted site visits to evaluate the teachers’ rapport with students, classroom environment, presentation skills, and teaching methods, among other criteria.

The teachers were then interviewed at the California Department of Education before Torlakson made the final selections.

Jocz has been a social studies teacher for 11 years, all at his present school, where he is a department chair, instructional leadership team member and associated student body advisor. His Advanced Placement U.S. History passage rate is among the highest in the district, in part, for his use of technology.

“My regular use of popular culture and music in my lessons has allowed me to create a curriculum that is not only rigorous, but also relevant, engaging, and develops media literacy skills,” he said in a statement. “To not teach this history…is to do a disservice to our nation’s rich, complicated past. This is why I committed my life to teaching history in an urban public school setting.”

The other winners are:

• Mitch Bahr, a music teacher at Foothill High School in Palo Cedro, Shasta Union High School District in Shasta County.
• Michelle Cherland, a second grade multi-subject teacher at Carrillo Ranch Elementary School in Indio, Desert Sands Unified School District in Riverside County.
• Doug Green, a broadcast journalism teacher at both Valley Middle School and Carlsbad High School in Carlsbad, Carlsbad Unified School District.
• Ann Park, a writing and science teacher at Greenleaf Elementary School in Oakland, Oakland Unified School District.