As many area schools are tacking on days to the school year following a large number of snow-days, one district is replacing those missed days another way.
Paducah Public Schools will keep students in class an extra 15 minutes at the end of the day starting February 24th until the end of the year.
By law, students must receive at least 1,062 hours of instruction over 170 six-hour instructional days.
Paducah Director of Pupil Personal Troy Brock says the extension is being used to account for that quota but also to not interrupt testing schedules at the end of the year.
“Testing is being pushed to the last two weeks of the school year so it kinda moves along with the district’s school calendar but we expect the teachers will use that extra time to incorporate either additional lesson time, or practice in order to prepare for K-prep come May.”
Two other city school districts in our area, Mayfield and Murray Independent schools, are only making up 3 snow days and both used February 17th, President's Day, as a make-up day.
Brock says the Paducah schools didn’t schedule for snow days because the city's roads are usually cleared pretty quickly.
“When we develop our calendar we don’t incorporate a lot of snow days throughout the year," said Brock. "I know a lot of county districts, they incorporate snows days within the February, March, April time frames in the event they do have a winter event like this. In the city we just don’t have a lot of severe weather but this year it hit us harder than others.”
Brock says the tentative last day of school for Paducah students is still tentatively May 29th unless more days are missed.
