Our county has had an overwhelming amount of Snow days and or situations causing us to close. This has brought a rising amount of concern from parents, teachers, and students. Many questions have arisen toward making up snow days and what will count against us in snow days. Ted Arneault and Dan Enich answered our questions to lessen everyone’s confusion.
When asked, how many remote days do we have left and what is our plan if we were to run out of remote and/or snow days Arneault stated, “The state mandates that students are budgeted 180 instructional days for the entire school year. 10 of those can be exempted due to emergencies and weather. All of our schools have 5 days for weather/ emergency in the calendar that do not have to be made up. We are also allowed 5 non- traditional learning days, where staff has to report to the building, but students can stay home. If we go beyond those 5 non-traditional days, then days would simply have to be made up.”
Teachers are also affected, “Teachers typically operate on a 200-day contract, so if we have additional days beyond the 10, they would simply be ‘snow days’ that have to be made up since staff wouldn’t be providing instruction on those days. If we go beyond our budgeted days then they have to be made up in one of the calendar OS (outside schedule) days which are part of our mini spring breaks, or in June at the end of the year until we reach 170 total “instructional” days.” Given this information we know we have slim to no days to miss without taking away our mini spring break.
Other questions asked have been is our state of emergency and our threats counted against us? Enich says, “We currently have 8 snow/closed days and 5 remote days. With this in mind, I have applied to the state for relief on 2 of the snow/closed days. The state considers snow days just that, snow days and do not allow for the days to be part of a waiver or request for relief by a school system. Because 9/11/24 and 9/12/24 were 2 days that the school system shut down because of the terroristic threats that were going on in Hancock County at the time, I have requested that those 2 days be exempt from the tally of days canceled.”
With all of these days that have been missed we wonder if we had to make up days what order would we make them up? “These days can come from March 19, 20, 21, or 24. Also April 17,18 or 21. May 26 is a holiday and cannot be used. The only other choice will be at the end of the school year, which is June 5 or 6.” “There is a chance that a portion of, or the whole spring break can be affected. I am hoping that this is not the case, but the state response will dictate how we go forward.” said Enich.
This winter we have had many snow days causing many cancelations and remote days. At this point we can not predict how the rest of our school year will go. We can only hope our school year will not go into June.
