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Snow Days Offer New Opportunities for Kentucky School Districts

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Kentucky School districts across the region are beginning to see benefits of a relatively new program called non-traditional instructional days.  

House Bill 211 passed in 2014 paving the way for the program.  The program allows all school districts to utilize online course documents and home-bound hard copies as an alternative to traditional school attendance.

Historically, schools would tack on extra days to the end of the school year if inclement weather prompted closures beyond a number of days built in to the school year. Now, participating schools schools would have to use all ten of their built in makeup days and  all ten non-traditional instructional days before prolonging the school year into the summer months.  

Todd County schools are in their second year of using nontraditional instructional days. Last year they used 8 of the ten days allowed. Assistant Superintendent Edwin Oyler says they prefer to use at least 5 of the makeup days built into the calendar before considering using the NTID program.

“More so when there is an outage of 3-4 days, for the single day outage it is not as well suited,” Oyler said.

Students that have internet access are able to participate in the program online. However, students are also given a hard copy of the assignments so they can complete the work if their internet connection fails or they don’t have access to the internet. Oyler says it’s a win-win and students understand that these are days they won’t have to make-up at the end of the year.

Webster County Schools are in their first year of the NTI program they refer to these days as link to learn days. Superintendent of Webster County schools Rachel Yarbrough says they plan to use 5 of their allotted ten days.  

“Our philosophy has been that we would utilize link to learn days first,” Yarbrough said.

Yarbrough says they have used two days so far this year and the program has worked “remarkably” well.

Graves County Schools are also in the first year of the NTI program. Amanda Henson, supervisor of elementary instruction for Graves County says the nontraditional instructional days help students continue their routine. She says it’s ideal to use these nontraditional instructional days when buses can’t get to school but staff can.

“It’s very hard in the classroom for teachers to miss several days in a row and get students totally out of their routine. So this is really just to continue learning on those days that we absolutely can’t get school and we cannot have students here,” Henson said.

Henson says the assignments are never new material but always a review of what students have already learned. She prefers for teachers to introduce any new material.

There are currently 44 schools in Kentucky participating in the NTI program for the 2015-2016 school year. All 173 Kentucky school districts are eligible to participate in the program according to education.ky.gov.

Becca Schimmel is a Becca Schimmel is a multimedia journalist with the Ohio Valley ReSource a collaborative of public radio stations in Kentucky, West Virginia and Ohio. She's based out of the WKU Public Radio newsroom in Bowling Green.
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