The following documents were presented for the joint East Sac County School Board's consideration on February 11, 2010.
According to the Superintendent Kruthoff, East Sac County School now meets the legal requirements for extending school days and that concept is more fully explained in the first document.
The second document provides a deeper explanation into the thinking behind how the days lost to foul weather were scheduled.
According to Ms. Kruthoff, the school doesn't need to ask permission to do extended days, but cautioned the board that if they decided to utilize extended days, they would have to very carefully coordinate the effort with parents since families typically do most of their daily planning based on the current length of the school day. A likely scenario should the boards decide to extend the school day would be to start the day 20 minutes earlier and to end the day 20 minutes later.
Because 40 minutes would be added to each day or about 1 period, what would happen would be that first period would rotate on an 8 day cycle. Day one would find the students doing a first period class and then proceeding to continue on to their normal class schedule. On day two, the students would start the day with their second period class, and then continue for the rest of the day on their normal class schedule. Day three they would start with their third period class, day four, fourth period class and so on through day 8. At that point, one full day of school would be made up, and they would start over by attending a first period class.
According to Ms. Kruthoff, there would be a few easy to work out glitches in some of the shared teacher schedules.
She also said that she doubted they would be able to get the union to agree to Saturdays.
Ms. Kruthoff also said the following, "I don't think the governor, nor is anyone else going to pardon us with any days. There's some rumor now, I understand, going around the communities that we can petition the governor. We can probably petition him but he's not going to do anything." She continued, "I think we're going to have to have closer to 20 days of absence, you know, 15, 18, 20 before they might, [consider pardons]"
The boards could consider extended days at the next board meeting if any more days are lost due to the weather. The problem is scheduling those days could be dicey because they are going to want to schedule them for 8 consecutive days of good weather. If one of the days in that 8 day cycle are lost, then that's potentially two periods of, (for example) English that could then be lost in one day. Losing a partial day of school could mean that both of those English periods could have been taken for the day,
Copyright (c)2007-2010 Curtis Bloes
All Rights Reserved
.jpg)
