Missed days affect local school calendars differently

Recent winter weather will have different impacts on area school districts moving forward for the rest of the academic year.

Students in the Berryville and Eureka Springs districts were out Monday through Thursday of last week, while Green Forest — which doesn’t hold classes on Mondays — was forced to close its doors three days because of the snow and a layer of sleet that fell the previous weekend.

Berryville and Eureka Springs use a non-traditional calendar throughout the year, adding extra time each day that can be used in the case classes need to be canceled for reasons such as winter weather.

“We use that nontraditional calendar where we’re banking time every day,” Berryville Superintendent Owen Powell said Friday, Jan. 23, as the district prepared for the approaching weather. “It’s an extra 15 minutes or so a day that we go longer than what is required.”

That extra time allows Berryville to accumulate six school days throughout the year that can either be used to make up missed days or taken off at the end to the year.

“It allows us to build up six snow days by banking those minutes,” Powell said. “So, we actually six days we can use before we have to start adding days to the calendar.”

Eureka Springs also uses a nontraditional schedule that is allowed by the state, as long as a district accumulates the required 1,068 hours throughout the year, superintendent Bryan Pruitt said.

“We have almost like an extended day, going 15 minutes early every day,” Pruitt said. “So, we have over five days built in by doing that.

“We’ve missed four days [so far] so we’ve still got a couple of days to play with in case we do need them. Right now we’re still in good shape because of that.”

The thought of adding 15 minutes to the start of each school day isn’t always popular when each school year’s calendar is approved, Pruitt said.

Last week’s winter weather make it all worth it, though, he said.

“I know that early on we had a couple of people fussing about our days, because they’re so long, but when we miss these snow days, yes, we’re going 15 minutes early, and boy do they forget that real quick,” Pruitt said. “So yeah, right now they’re tickled to death that we go 15 minutes earlier because our four days are covered.

“If we’re fortunate enough to make it through the rest of the year then we might have a couple of days that we could take off at the end.”

For Green Forest, the options for snow days are more limited because of the the district being on a fourday weekly schedule, said superintendent David Gilmore, whose district was forced to cancel classes on Tuesday, Wednesday and Thursday of last week.

“We do have built-in snow days, but I think some people think that just means, hey, you get off that day, it’s no big deal,” Gilmore said. “But no, we do have to make those days up.”

The four-day schedule doesn’t give Green Forest the luxury of having a nontraditional schedule similar to that of Berryville and Eureka Springs, especially since each day already counts as 1.25 days in the school calendar, Gilmore said.

“Three days for us, each day is 1.25 days, but we’ll still just go with a long day like we normally have and make up a long day,” Gilmore said.

While a final decision hadn’t been made by the district as of Monday afternoon, Feb. 2, Gilmore said discussion had taken place of possibly having students attend class on Tuesday, Feb. 10, a day originally scheduled as a parent- teacher conference day when students weren’t originally going to attend.

The other two missed days would then likely be made up at the end of the year, Gilmore said.

“We’re supposed to get out on Wednesday, May 20, so we can tack on two more days and finish out that week and go through May 23, which still gets us out before Memorial Day if we don’t have anymore weather days, of course,” he said.

The district had seven snow days last year and was forced to make up a few days on Mondays, which makes for a particularly long week with the extended daily schedule, Gilmore said.

“It makes it a really long week,” he said. “Sometimes we do those things just to try to get out before Memorial Day, if possible, but we could tack on some days after that, too, if we get additional days.”

All area superintendents said there were talks of holding class last Thursday, but each agreed waiting until Friday was the safest option, they said.

“We were contemplating maybe having school Thursday,” Gilmore said. “I know all three superintendents were kind of looking at that, but by the end of the day, it just hadn’t melted enough like we wanted it to. We didn’t want to take any chances so we all pushed it to Friday.”

Pruitt agreed.

“I tried to weigh the options,” he said of holding class last Thursday. “I’m like, we have more risks than we have benefits of being here, so that’s what we decided.”