Students in Carter County schools have missed a few days due to weather this month, but overall the system is still in good shape with its schedule.
So far this year, Carter County Schools have canceled school a total of five days. The system has 13 “snow days” built into its calendar for the year, Director of Schools Dr. Kevin Ward said, which leaves the system with eight remaining.
“We’ve had a pretty good run,” Ward said on Tuesday. “We got through January with very few cancellations.
“Typically the pattern has always been that in the first two weeks of February a system dumps something on us,” Ward added. “With the extended forecast, it looks like we might make it through the first week of February without any bad weather.”
On Tuesday, the main roads in the county were clear in most areas, but Ward said in the higher elevation communities of Roan Mountain, Elk Mills, and Poga, there were still some areas where travel would not have been safe Tuesday morning. Ward said he and Transportation Director Wayne Sams evaluate the roads whenever inclement weather hits and will err on the side of caution when it comes whether or not to cancel school.
“I would prefer 10 good chewings from someone wanting to know why we were out of school than one conversation with a parent about a bus accident and trying to explain why we were in school,” Ward said.
A question that is often asked regarding school closures is why does the system cancel school system-wide rather than just closing schools in the affected areas. Ward said the answer to that question includes a lot of variables.
The first of those variables, he said, has to do with school scheduling and state requirements and how closing some schools and not others would impact those things.
“We have a set number of days a student has to be there, and that’s 180,” Ward said. “If you’ve got one school that’s four or five days behind the others it affects testing, and we would have to show the state why they were out and when they made up their time.”
In addition to a minimum number of days for the school year, Ward said some of the mandated student testing has a required number of days the students must be in class before they can take the test.
“It just creates a whole lot of problems,” Ward said of canceling some schools but not others. “We have to stay on schedule, more so now than in years past.”
In addition to the testing and trying to keep students on the same schedule system-wide, the decision to close some schools and leave others open can have a financial impact on the school system.
“The daily average attendance is where our funding comes from,” Ward said, adding the Basic Education Program (BEP) money from the state as well as some federal funding is based on average attendance. “If we close some schools it shows that those kids weren’t there, and we don’t get that funding.”