School board members discuss Feb. 29 school closing with district bus drivers
March 15, 2012 at 9:08 am in Lake County News-Chronicle
The midday school closing Feb. 29 continues to be a source of debate as local bus drivers appeared before the Lake Superior School District school board at the school board meeting last Thursday. Continue Reading
“Moe also said some people seem to think schools in the Lake Superior School District closed after midday because of foundation aid. “That is absolutely false. I just want to make that perfectly clear,” Moe said.”—–I think its pretty clear from Department of Education guidelines, under normal circumstances, Mr. Moe is correct.
I posted a link last week to an MDOE Marss Memo which outlines circumstances surrounding school closing:
http://education.state.mn.us/search?q=annual+instructional+hours&searchbutton=Go&output=xml_no_dtd&oe=UTF-8&ie=UTF-8&client=New_frontend&proxystylesheet=New_frontend&site=default_collection
Click on the “MARRS Memo” link.
Quote from that memo:
“Will we lose state aid if we do not make it up? (My note: Referring to a closure day)
No. There is no longer a financial penalty for having too few days. The statute requires independent school districts to schedule at least as many instructional days as were originally scheduled for FY 1997; it did not provide a penalty for not meeting this schedule. But again, your local board must be accountable to the students and families; they need to formally modify the calendar if it is different than the original. However, students whose ADM is based on a statute-defined number of hours will generate fewer membership hours if the canceled instruction is not rescheduled. Specifically, kindergarten-disabled and early childhood students with more than 231 membership hours are affected. Also, the summer or extended-day membership of dual-enrolled students at an alternative program would generate less ADM if the core year membership provided fewer than the statute-defined minimums for learning year programs.”
The possible financial issue for the school was posited as follows (Quote from last week’s comment):
“Now, our school district is operating under a strict waiver allowing a four-day week operation. That waiver set certain standards for the district to follow. Without knowing, I am assuming the reluctance to close during the storm could have been related to these standards. Basically, the school may have been faced with having to make up a closed day or lose a daily equivalent of its funding dollars, but that might be specific to the four-day week waiver since the state no longer penalizes schools on an ADM basis for those types of issues, unless a statutory number of days is specified for certain classifications of students.
Making that day up by adding an extra day at some other point in the year may have been costly if teachers, transportation employees and administrative staff had to be paid additional amounts. I don’t know the terms of their contracts, so I’m sure of how the closures are addressed. Whatever the point, having to address any of these issues normally is always a challenge, but under the terms of the four-day week it might have been more challenging.”
So, the issue is does the day or missed instructional hours have to made up, and will that cause the school system to incur additional costs? And could any possible additional costs have had an influence on the school closing decision. That is what Mr. Moe should have addressed within the context of the 4-day week working waiver agreement with the MN DOE, and within the policies discussed in the referenced MARRS memo. I don’t read he has directly answered that question in the newspaper article.
Perhaps Mr. Moe could answer that question in another interview. If not, I’d be glad to check with the MN DOE, myself.
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