Pocahontas School Superintendent Explains This Year’s Revised School Calendar

A lot of Pocahontas County parents and students have been wondering about when school will end this school year and if they will get a Spring Break because of all the missed days due to the work stoppage and snow days. To get these answers, we spoke to Terrance Beam, School Superintendent.

“As you well know, we’ve had a lot of interruptions with instruction this year with weather days and of course the work stoppage” said Beam. “There’s a lot of rumors out there as to how much time we have to make up and how much time the teachers have to make up. So I want to try and shed a little light on it. I want to preface that by saying, this is a fluid situation, and another weather system moving into our area could curtail our plans. But all I can tell you as of today the last day for students, pending any other snow days, would be June the 13^th, which would be a three hour early dismissal. That would satisfy the State requirement of 180 days. Everyone has to understand that those 180 days requirements allows us to count five of the snow days that we’ve already had as instructional days –so we don’t have to make up five of those days. But after that, we have to make up all of the days we missed. As of today, we have missed a total of fourteen snow days and then nine days during the work stoppage. So we’re talking about 23 days of instruction that’s been missed as of right now, March 15^th. We will be having Spring Break April 2^nd through the 6^th for students this year, we did protect those days from the kids having to make them up. So that’s kind of where we are right now, we’re trying to work through this. We understand the kids need to be out of school early in June, but there is just no way of predicting this stuff and no way of heading it off early. But we had as many days as we could and we are giving them their Spring Break. We have moved back our testing window a little bit to where it ends on June 1^st. That gives the teachers a little bit more time to prepare the students for the testing. I am always hopeful that the State maybe will come in and say ‘you know we don’t want the kids in school that complete number of days’, maybe they’ll forgive a couple of days. I don’t expect that to happen, but I am always hopeful that it could.”

As far as the number of additional days, beyond the extra days the students will be making up, that teachers and other school employees could be required to make up because of the work-stoppage time they missed; Mr. Beam says that is still being worked out. Allegheny Mountain Radio will provide that information as soon as we receive it. Mr. Beam did want to reiterate that students will receive the full 180 days instruction as required by the State, and that teachers will completely fulfill the 200 days of work that their contracts require.