East Hampton School Board Seeks Flexibility in Dealing with Snow Days

Oh those snow days. Our winter to remember, or forget depending on how you want to look at it, left school officials scrambling to make up the school days lost to the weather.

In Portland, the board of education voted to eliminate part of February vacation as well as extend the school year from June 12 to June 17. Had there been more snow days, the board voted to go deeper into June in an effort to save April vacation. The weather since has cooperated and the April break spared.

The East Hampton Board of Education gave serious weight to not having the school year go beyond June 17, since that was the date of graduation. Plans for the graduation party were set, reservations made and asking the seniors to come back to school June 20 didn’t seem logical. As a result, April vacation was lost.

Whether you agreed with your local school board’s decision, they tried to make the best of a bad situation. Hamstrung by a state regulation (chapter 64, section 10-16) requiring districts to have at least 180 school days, extending the school calendar well into June or eliminating February or April breaks were the only options available other than to move a professional development day to the end of the school year or have school on a holiday. Finding a day or two helped, but given the impact this past winter had on the school calendar, was hardly enough to address the problem.

There has to be a better way, right? Asking kids to go from late February to mid-June without a significant break is a lot to ask of them. If you’ve ever been in some of the classrooms at East Hampton’s Center School on the kind of hot day June can bring, you know how distracting that can be. Fans only can do so much.

East Hampton board of education member Don Coolican thinks there is a better way, one that will allow school districts the kind of flexibility to adequately address the problems too many snow days can bring.

In addition to requiring districts to have 180 school days, the state regulation goes on to include "with at least 900 hours of instruction."

Coolican’s idea is to ditch the 180-day requirement and have classroom hours define the school year.

“I strongly believe in this idea of modifying the regulation concerning the school year,” Coolican said at the March 14 board of ed meeting. “I think it might have a chance to actually have legs. In this environment, if we’re ever going to get something like this, this would be it.”

After a month of discussion and crafting a letter to Gov. Dannel Malloy and other state officials and legislators, Coolican’s idea is ready to be forwarded for their review and consideration. On Monday, the board of education unanimously  approved the letter.

One example in the letter of how a school district could address snow days is for the district to add 20 minutes to each day for 90 days, which would add 30 hours of instruction, nearly a full week.

“The name of the game is hours in class,” Coolican has said. “If you spend the hours in class in 175 days or 180, what’s the difference?”

According to Coolican, East Hampton children are scheduled to be in school about 1,000 hours, easily meeting the 900-hour requirement. That requirement could go up, however, with any revision to the law.

“The upside is obvious, the downside is if you start counting hours and your counting hours every day. If you had a late arrival or early dismissal, you have to subtract those hours,” school superintendent Dr. Judith Golden said.

Whether this modification to the state regulation, and any counting of hours that might be necessary, would make the superintendent’s job easier, Golden said: “It isn’t really about me. It is really about the families and the staff and the disruption to graduations especially.”

In addition to saving vacations and avoiding disruptions to graduation, the letter points out how this idea is good for everyone, including teachers and other staff, who would not have to have their work year extended. Of course, collective bargaining units would have to agree with the idea.

Coolican’s idea is not unique. Oklahoma is one state that changed its law in 2009 to allow school districts to decide how the school year is calculated, either in days or hours.

The new Oklahoma law allows schools to complete 1,080 hours or 176 days of instruction. As of 2010, almost 400 school districts had voted to adopt the new policy to count hours rather than days.

East Hampton’s vision is similar; a law that allows districts to decide whether to lengthen days, add make-up days to the school calendar, or perhaps a combination of the two.

Whether Connecticut would cede some control and give it to the local boards of education remains to be seen.

“All we’re looking for is the ability to make those decisions,” Coolican said. “Right now we have no ability to make any of those decisions.”