Why doesn't MCPS include more than 1 snow day in the calendar?

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:This is a lose lose topic.... If they have unused snowdays, people are mad that schoold didn't end earlier. If we go over, people want more snowdays added. For 5 years we didn't use a single snowday. It all evens out. People need to calm down and realize that situations like this are once every 10 years or so. Hopefully MCPS will use the contingency days before adding useless 1//2 days at the end of June.

That doesn’t make sense. If you don’t use the snow days, you don’t go to school on those days marked as snow day makeup on the calendar. That’s the way my school district worked growing up. Since snow typically ends in February (maybe March in some years), you have months to adjust plans to whatever the definitive calendar for snow is.

Students get 180 days, and you don’t get shortchanged instructional time like this half days in June mess we had last years.

And I disagree that this is a once in 10 years snow event. We had 4 unplanned for snow days last year and MCPS only budgeted for one in its calendar. All our neighboring counties have more than one snow day built into their calendar (FCPS, DCPS, Baltimore County, Anne Arundel etc).

You seem to be mixing up the two different snow days. There are built in days that are already assigned to go to school, so really the school from the start is having students go 183 if there are three built in days or in MCPS case we have 181 assigned days to account for one built in snow days. These don't have to be made up but if there are no emergency days used, we still go those days. Then there are snow make up days or contingency days which are put on the calendar as options to make up days if we haven't reached 180 days of required school due to emergency days.

So in our case right now we have to make up 3 emergency days, since we had one built into the calendar already.

Maryland has a rule that school systems need to make up three days before they will waive any days, so we will only potentially get a waiver if we miss more days, but that's not guaranteed. Given that rule though, there's no need to have anymore than three built in days. Although there's some debate if maryland would still require three additional days to the calendar, in which case why have any built in days if you have to add three to apply for a waiver?

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:This is a lose lose topic.... If they have unused snowdays, people are mad that schoold didn't end earlier. If we go over, people want more snowdays added. For 5 years we didn't use a single snowday. It all evens out. People need to calm down and realize that situations like this are once every 10 years or so. Hopefully MCPS will use the contingency days before adding useless 1//2 days at the end of June.

That doesn’t make sense. If you don’t use the snow days, you don’t go to school on those days marked as snow day makeup on the calendar. That’s the way my school district worked growing up. Since snow typically ends in February (maybe March in some years), you have months to adjust plans to whatever the definitive calendar for snow is.

Students get 180 days, and you don’t get shortchanged instructional time like this half days in June mess we had last years.

And I disagree that this is a once in 10 years snow event. We had 4 unplanned for snow days last year and MCPS only budgeted for one in its calendar. All our neighboring counties have more than one snow day built into their calendar (FCPS, DCPS, Baltimore County, Anne Arundel etc).

You seem to be mixing up the two different snow days. There are built in days that are already assigned to go to school, so really the school from the start is having students go 183 if there are three built in days or in MCPS case we have 181 assigned days to account for one built in snow days. These don't have to be made up but if there are no emergency days used, we still go those days. Then there are snow make up days or contingency days which are put on the calendar as options to make up days if we haven't reached 180 days of required school due to emergency days.

So in our case right now we have to make up 3 emergency days, since we had one built into the calendar already.

Maryland has a rule that school systems need to make up three days before they will waive any days, so we will only potentially get a waiver if we miss more days, but that's not guaranteed. Given that rule though, there's no need to have anymore than three built in days. Although there's some debate if maryland would still require three additional days to the calendar, in which case why have any built in days if you have to add three to apply for a waiver?

And now we have to make up 4 days due to the snowstorm-with all of February and March still pending for additional snow events.

But MCPS seems to prefer asking the state for a waiver so it doesn’t need to offer 180 days of instruction like the rest of the country than building in snow days. Shameful!