DECATUR — As long as there are no more snow days, the last day of school for students in the Decatur School District will be June 4, according to superintendent LeRoy Ortman.
The last day of school was originally scheduled for May 28, but that was before northwest Arkansas was slammed with winter weather in December and January and the Decatur School District was forced to use eight snow days.
Ortman proposed two plans for making up the lost school days and asked teachers and staff to vote on which one they would prefer. The first option was to stick to the original school calendar and add eight days on to the end of the semester - in which case school would let out for students on June 9. The second option was to use Memorial Day as a make-up day and move two teacher development days scheduled for March and April to the end of the semester.
Teachers and staff voted overwhelmingly to give up the Memorial Day holiday and shift the teacher development days to shorten the school year, Ortman said. Under the new plan the last day of school for students will be June 4 and the last day for teachers will be June 8. If there are more snowdays, they will be added on to the end of the semester, Ortman said.
The district could have used spring break for make-up days, but Ortman said he personally scrapped that plan, explaining that he was concerned parents had already made plans or bought tickets for spring break and didn’t have any warning that the break could be used to make up snow days. The school calendar did state that extra snow days would be made up at the end of the spring semester, so parents planning vacations in early June did have some warning, Ortman said.
The updated school calendar will also give students two more days of classroom instruction before the Benchmark and End-of-Course exams.
Several northwest Arkansas school districts have shown concern because the instructional time they have lost because of snow days will give them a disadvantage on the exams.
“Our biggest concern is that we’ve missed eight days leading right into these standardized tests,” Gary Compton, Bentonville superintendent, told the Benton County Daily Record last week.
Hartzell Jones, Springdale deputy superintendent, had similar concerns.
northern parts of the state in comparison with schools farther south.
“It puts schools in the northern half of the state at somewhat of a disadvantage.
"There’s not much you can do about it except work harder and smarter in the classroom,” Ortman said.
“We’ve lost seven days that we could have been helping kids prepare for these exams,” he said.
Ortman said the concern is that missed days will lower scores for
News, Pages 1 on 02/24/2010