2025-2026 MHPSD Calendar

We are pleased to share the calendar for the 2025-2026 MHPSD school year. The following breakdown helps for understanding of how the feedback from staff and families informed the outcome. We conducted engagement with staff and families, receiving 324 school staff responses and 78 school council responses.

Staff | Staff liked the idea of a November break, although a significant portion of people still preferred Calendar B which did not include an additional day off in November. Many expressed a concern about the 5-day PD start proposed in Calendar B. A suggestion provided by a number of staff was to move a PD to September to support adjustments or planning at the beginning of the year, rather than placing it in months with fewer instructional days, such as December and April.

Families | More than half of the feedback from this group indicated that they would defer to teacher preferences. They appreciated starting the school year after Labour Day but raised concerns about needing to find additional childcare if we had an extra day in November without school.

After reviewing the feedback, the Board approved the calendar with the following adjustments:

• The PD Day in December be moved to September as suggested by staff. This would provide 91 instructional days in each semester.
• The last day of work for teachers is June 26th. This is because the last diploma exam is Tuesday, June 23 and there was concern shared for the impact on high schools if they had an entire week without students if the calendar went until June 30. 
• Reduce the overall operational days from 197 to 196 to address concerns of an entire week of PD to start the year. This will also match the number of operational days in our current school year and of the calendars of our other local divisions. Note: 197 operational days has been our most frequent number of days in the last 10 years of calendars.