The Eureka Springs School District is taking a bit of a pivot on how it’s handling make-up snow days thanks to a recent decision by state officials.
Superintendent Bryan Pruitt sent a letter to all district employees on Monday, Jan. 30, outlining a plan that would prevent the district from having to add any days on at the end of the school year as originally planned.
The district recently announced that students will be in session on President’s Day to make up one of the three days missed, with the other two being tacked on at the end of the school year.
Now, the Arkansas Department of Education is allowing districts to request a waiver from a traditional 178-day schedule to an alternate schedule of 1,068 hours.
“They came out with that last Thursday,” Pruitt said. “I think they’ve been getting heat down in Little Rock, which is probably deserved.”
With the waiver request, Eureka Springs will be adding 15 minutes to the schedule each day, beginning Monday, Feb. 5.
“…We will be adding a total of 15 minutes per day to our instructional time, by starting 10 minutes early and ending 5 minutes later than normal,” Pruitt wrote in the letter to staff. “High School and Middle School will start classes at 7:45 and Elementary will begin at 7:50.” Classes will still be held on President’s Day, Monday, Feb. 19, and the 15 extra minutes each day will return the final day of classes to the originally planned date of May 21.
“All school districts have to build five snow days into their calendar, and you always put them on the end,” Pruitt said. “But, that doesn’t help you with testing. We really need to get all of our instructional time in before we take our endof- the-year tests, so we need that valuable time for face-to-face teaching. So, that’s why we decided to go ahead and do that.”
Two plans were presented to the district’s Personnel Policy Committee, Pruitt said.
“The Secretary of Education told us to meet with our PPC committees and make sure they’re on board with it and start it immediately,” he said. “He said the state board is going to approve the waivers at their next meeting the second week of February, about the same time when our next board meeting is, so they told us to go ahead and implement it and start making those minutes up.
“I took two different scenarios to our PPC, a 15-minute plan and a 20-minute plan and they chose the 15.”
District buses are already on campus by 7:35 a.m. each day, Pruitt said.
“So, it really isn’t going to make much a difference for those students who were already going to be here 10 minutes early,” he said. “ … I think everybody, for the most part, will like this. There are probably some who don’t, but I think for the most part everyone will be fine with it. The only disruption that I anticipate is getting our car riders dropped off. Like at the elementary, some of them don’t get here until right about five minutes until 8, so we’ll need them to get here at like 7:45.”
While the change will go into effect Feb. 5, the school board will still need to approve the calendar change at its next meeting.
“I did talk to our board members and made them aware of what’s going on and then they’ll act on it at their next meeting,” Pruitt said. “I did get the green light from them.”
Pruitt said any more days missed because of winter weather will be added on to the end of the year.
“We won’t add any more minutes,” he said. “We’ll just have to make it up at the end.”
