Each Groundhog Day, the prognosticator known as Punxsutawney Phil is pulled from his home to divulge the weather forecast for the next month and a half. With the groundhog’s correct prediction of six more weeks of winter earlier this year, school districts across Arkansas have taken several snow days. These abundant snow days are threatening summer break as superintendents must make decisions about when those days will be made up.
This crisis has arisen before, as recently as last winter, in fact. The winter of 2013-2014 saw several schools across the northern third of the state miss more snow days than administrators had built into the school calendars. Districts in White, Cleburne and Independence counties were among the harder-hit schools a year ago.
Quitman school leaders decided, based on winter-weather closures that totaled 15 days in 2013-2014, to set aside that number of additional days and increase the district’s flexibility with regard to forced closures during the 2014-2015 school year.
Furthermore, many districts had snow days built into their yearly schedules this winter so that if no school had been missed by that date, the set-aside snow day would have been a day off for students, but if there was a need to make up a day, they would be in class.
Many of these snow days, however, were slated for January and February, but the icy conditions in late February and early March have caused many districts to either pass or exceed the number of those built-in days. Now those districts may have to tack on school days at the end of the year in order to reach the required minimum of in-class time.
Legally, Arkansas schools are required to be in session for at least 178 days each school year. Last year’s winter weather caused a problem for many districts, prompting the state Board of Education to approve waiver requests from certain districts, thus allowing them to skip making up some of those missed days.
On Thursday, virtually every school district in the Three Rivers Edition coverage area was closed because of a layer of ice and snow that arrived Wednesday afternoon and evening and lasted until the wee hours of Thursday morning. Several districts — the Batesville School District, for instance — were either closed or dismissed early on Wednesday in advance of the worsening conditions.
In the Cabot Public School District, the largest district in the Three Rivers Edition coverage area, classes were out for six days last year. On Thursday, the district’s classes were out for the sixth day in the 2014-15 school year. One built in make-up day that will be utilized is March 20, but the rest will be made up at the end of the year. According to the district’s calendar, the final day of school was set to be May 28, but that last day will be delayed now that the district has slated several makeup days.
Arkansas Gov. Asa Hutchinson recently signed House Bill 1313 into law. The resulting Act 286 gives school districts the option to make up missed school days by adding time to the beginning or end of regular school days for a minimum of 60 minutes. According to the bill, this measure is appropriate “if a superintendent cancels a regularly scheduled school day due to exceptional or emergency circumstances such as a contagious disease outbreak, inclement weather or other acts of God.”
The emergency clause attached to the bill states that the Arkansas General Assembly found “that school districts need more flexibility to manage make-up school days missed due to exceptional or emergency circumstances; that we are entering the time of year when many school days are missed due to weather; and that this act is immediately necessary to ensure that school district flexibility is in place before the end of the current school year.”