The John Glenn School Board members will wait until April to formally approve a decision regarding snow make-up days.
Superintendent Richard Reese said the corporation may not need to make up three days missed due to inclement weather. He commented that since the corporation is a qualified school corporation, the Department of Education is providing flexibility of the 180 instructional day requirement for students if minimum instructional minutes are met.
“The minimal instructional requirement by the DOE is that you have to have 300 minutes in elementary school and 360 in the high school,” explained Reese. “We have way more than the number of instructional minutes by about 30 days in the elementary and 8 in the middle school and 10 in the high school. So what they’re allowing schools to do is consider yourself a completed school year if you have only 177 days or 176 days if you’re that many minutes above the minimum.”
Reese confirmed that the corporation meets the requirements.
What Reese proposed was that the school year ends on Thursday, May 30, which was approved as the last day of school when the calendar was considered last year.
“I talked with our Teacher’s Association and they were in general agreement that we finish on that Thursday, teachers come on Friday like they normally do and then we have three days that we would ask teachers to return and require them, if they want to get paid, for in-service, some sort of professional development, work in their room, work K-12 curriculum-wise, or we could get some coordination between the schools and within that curriculum.”
Teachers could also get prepared for summer school which is set to start shortly after the end of the regular school year.
Since the topic wasn’t a formal action item listed on the meeting agenda, the board members will take up the issue again when they meet on Tuesday, April 9.
