Petaluma City Schools is adding three days back to its 2011-12 school calendar after the recently-adopted state budget was less horrible than expected.

In the midst of the state budget crisis, lawmakers have temporarily lifted requirements that the school year be a minimum of 180 days.  For the last few years, with the specter of penalty lifted, school districts across Sonoma County and California (Petaluma included) have cut days from their school year in order to save money.

But officials from the county’s second largest school district felt confident enough in the latest state budget to reinstate two classroom and one teacher development day to the upcoming school year as part of their $68 million spending plan.

But it’s not good enough, said Petaluma’s interim Superintendent Steve Bolman. California is taking its kids in the wrong direction with the calendar-cutbacks, he said.

“We are at 180 and we should be working out way to 200…the rest of industrial world is at 200 or 200-plus days of school but we in California are backing up,” he said.

And things could get worse.

If state revenues don’t materialize as expected (and assumed in the state budget), then K-12 schools will have to cut approximately $2 billion. The only real way to do that is in school days – meaning the school year could be peeled back to 168 days, according to Bolman.

“I don’t know when we have ever been at 168 days. It doesn’t make any sense,” he said. “We are going the wrong way at a time when we need to be providing the sufficient number of instructional days to be competitive in a global environment.”