Some Arkansas school districts have already set records this school year for the number of days missed because of slick roads, with weeks of winter left and forecasters predicting more bouts of snow and ice.
The school cancellations have forced some districts - particularly those in northern Arkansas - to plan to make up the days on holidays, weekends and even spring break. Officials in the northern districts say the missed days are disrupting preparations for approaching academic tests, though they’re doing what they can to get the students ready for them.
Districts in central and south Arkansas aren’t facing makeup days. They have had a milder winter and haven’t used as many snow days.
“In Northwest Arkansas, we’re being held to the same standards [as central and south Arkansas],” said Harrison School District Superintendent Melinda Moss, whose students had missed 12 days as of Friday. “We’ve already missed at least two weeks of instruction. We’re really hurting in terms of preparation [for tests].”
It’s been a record year for snow days - at least in recent memory - for the rural Jasper School District, Superintendent Kerry Saylors said. The three-campus district stretches across parts of Newton, Madison and Johnson counties.
As of Friday, the district’s Oark campus had missed 18 days, its Kingston campus 17 days and its Jasper campus 16 days.
Many of the district’s bus routes are on two-lanes roads that wind around mountains with sharp turns and steep inclines, making them treacherous if there’s snow or ice. Frozen precipitation on dirt roads and on shaded, north-facing roadways is slow to melt.
As of Friday, at least 26 school districts in Northwest Arkansas - including Bentonville, Fayetteville and Rogers - had exceeded 10 snow days.
The Berryville, Eureka Springs, Green Forest, Huntsville, Omaha and West Fork districts all have canceled 17 days of classes because of snow and ice.
The cancellations aren’t just a problem in regard to preparing for standardized tests. State law requires school districts to hold 178 six-hour instructional days during an academic year. They also must build five makeup days into their school calendars.
For districts aiming to make up the missed days before the scheduled Arkansas Benchmark and End-of-Course exams, the options for makeup days are waning.
Testing for 11th-grade students begins March 11. From then on, exams are given nearly weekly until May 13.
TIGHT SCHEDULE
District officials approve their school calendars a year in advance. In them, they schedule days for teacher preparation and training, holidays and spring break. Shoehorning in makeup days is tough, and district can never please everyone.
A memorandum from the Arkansas Department of Education suggests that districts make up missed days by using the five bad-weather days built into their calendars, canceling planned holidays, using part or all of spring break, and extending the school year.
Students in the Springdale School District had missed 10 days of school as of Friday. Superintendent Jim Rollins remembers canceling classes for 12 days during the winter in 1979.
He said adding days to the end of the school year gets students the required days of instruction, but are not as effective as if the days are made up before the academic testing, he said.
“The driving force is the state tests are set,” Rollins said. “You want to do everything to get them [students] well-prepared. The idea of adding days after the fact, given the new accountability measures that are currently in place, doesn’t appear to be as significant as trying to get as much instructional time in beforehand.”
Rollins hopes state legislators will consider giving school districts more flexibility in setting the school calendar.
If testing dates are a concern, state officials should consider moving the test dates, said Gary Ritter, director of the Office for Education Policy at the University of Arkansas at Fayetteville. So many conclusions about schools are drawn from testing, and scores aren’t reported to schools until midsummer, he said.
Canceling holidays and weekends interferes with family events and extracurricular activities, said Bentonville School District Superintendent Mike Poore.
“Well, there’s so many things that go on in the community on Saturdays,” he said. “Our high school has big events on Saturdays that are tournaments. We have very few options where we could put those [makeup days] without a big overlap.”
This year, the district’s staff simply may not get to cover all of the testing material before students are tested.
“It’s not a perfect world right now,” he said.
Districts in central Arkansas have fared better.
The Little Rock, North Little Rock and Pulaski County Special school districts had canceled only three school days as of Friday, officials said, although they all closed early Friday because of snow in the forecast.
The three districts’ superintendents, with input from the National Weather Service, typically make a joint decision on whether to close on snow days because each district has students who transfer among the other districts during the day.
The decision-making process is “a well-oiled machine,” said Pulaski County Special School District spokesman Deb Roush. Officials get detailed weather updates combined with “boots on the ground.” Superintendents and transportation employees with all of the districts drive the bus routes in the early mornings to help decide whether to close or delay classes on a particular inclement day.
All three of the school districts plan to make up the missed days by adding to the end of the school year.
STATE WAIVERS
Arkansas Department of Education Commissioner Tom Kimbrell issued a memorandum to superintendents, charter school directors and co-op directors last month, informing them that districts that have missed more than 10 days could submit requests for waivers of the state rules.
The Department of Education staff will review requests on a case-by-case basis and make recommendations to the state Board of Education, which will consider the waivers at its March 13 meeting. So far, no district has petitioned for a waiver, but the districts have until Feb. 28 to do so.
In the past, the state required the districts to make up 10 days and then half of the days missed after that.
Districts don’t have many other options, but Poore said he’d like the Education Department to consider allowing 30 minutes to an hour of instruction each day to help with the snow days.
Despite missing 15 school days as of Friday, Gentry School District Superintendent Randy Barrett said it was the right decision to cancel classes on all of those days. The 15 days is the most that his district has missed in the 22 years he has led it.
“From the big picture, which is safety, our decision to have school or not is, ‘If this was the first day of bad weather, would we come tomorrow?’” Barrett said. “If the answer is ‘no,’ then we close. Safety trumps all other considerations.”
The district will make up days by having classes on holidays and during spring break, and extending the school year into June, Barrett said.
“We saved spring break as a last resort because we published a calendar last year, and we felt parents had relied on that for possible family vacations away,” Barrett said.
Barrett plans to seek a waiver for some of the days Gentry students missed, he said.
West Fork has canceled 17 days of school, the most snow days for the district in the 11 years that Superintendent John Karnes has been at the helm. He is hesitant about requesting a state waiver.
“Our students have already missed enough instruction without asking the state to waive additional days,” he said.
Front Section, Pages 1 on 02/10/2014