By Zach Markovic w/Plano Star
Last week’s impromptu vacation for students and staff members is now forcing the district to scramble to make up the “bad weather” days.
According to a statement released on the PISD website, the official last day of school will be June 6. This will allow the district to make up two of the four days missed last week. The district will look to get a waiver from the Texas Education Agency to make up the other two days.
And with Wednesday’s closure and winter woes not over yet, district officials are reminded of the fact that more waiver requests are possible.
Suzanne Marchman, spokesperson for the TEA, said the waivers are there to ensure districts stay within state laws. Should a school or district have to close because of weather, health or other safety issues, it must make up at least two of the days missed before it can request a waiver.
“State law says that students must have 180 days of instruction and this waives that requirement for those days missed,” Marchman said.
Marchman said the TEA will expect to hear from the PISD and other snow-covered districts once the weather clears out. The waivers require the board of trustees to vote on whether to request them.
“They usually wait until all of the days have accumulated and then vote on it,” Marchman said.
There is not a limit on how many days can be waived. Each waiver is judged on a day-by-day basis by a department within the TEA. Marchman said the department will look at the response to the board vote for the waivers, the community support and other factors to determine whether the closure was necessary or not.
So while it is possible for waivers to be denied, she said TEA’s biggest concern in the whole process is to make sure the students have a safe instructional environment. Inclement weather conditions and icy roads are generally enough to convince the waiver department.
“The state does not want to put student safety at risk,” Marchman said.
During the downtime, the district did what it could to ensure schools would be ready once the city thawed and students were in the classrooms again. Lesley Range-Stanton, spokesperson for the PISD, said during inclement weather the schools will turn down the thermostats and other utilities to conserve power and costs; nothing is ever completely shut off as they don’t want the inclement weather affecting pipes and other parts of the facilities. Such problems could lead to further school closures if repairs became necessary.
Like everyone else in North Texas last week, the PISD was hit by rolling blackouts and did its part to conserve energy.
“Typically we would not shut down utilities when it is really cold; so to avoid frozen pipes, we did [it] this time as a response to the ‘cut back on power’ request,” Range-Stanton said.
