001Welcome Clearwater USD264 staff, parents, patrons, and anyone watching on YouTube. Welcome to the superintendent update. Uh Clearwater Clarity Volume 18 for April of 2025. Um so glad that we're kind of moving into the spring and working into the last quarter of our school year. We're excited about all the opportunities and the growth that have happened this year, but really want to come to you this month with an opportunity to talk about snow days. So hopefully as we roll into April 1st and we roll into the rest of the school year, we don't have to worry about snow days the rest of this year. We might, you never know, but hopefully we don't have to. So I really want to talk about and just clear up and provide some really strong communication and specifically relevant communication
002about technically we we call them snow days. Uh what are they? What do we have and and how do we make up days uh in doing that? So really within our strategic plan is making sure that we have some strong communication so patrons, community, family and staff and students also understand uh the complexity of everything that goes into ensuring that we have a fully accredited uh school year. So uh the what that we're going to talk about is uh probably prior to the early 2000s, mid 2000s, u 2008, 2009, somewhere in that neighborhood. Prior to that, every school year, uh, every school district in the state had to go to 186 days of school. And that's probably why as we grew up and we understood things, we thought about the idea of snow days. And
003we had that opportunity to if you took a snow day off, then you still had to have 186 days. So, you had to maybe make up days and do some of those things as in the past. Uh, so starting around 2009, somewhere in that area, the law kind of changed to where you could choose days or hours. So, you could choose 1686 days or you could choose 1,116 hours. The law has now changed to where it's just hours. We must attend at minimum 1,116 hours for uh K through 11th grade and 1,096 hours uh for our 12th grades or our seniors. And you must meet those hours within a calendar year um to be able to be considered it an accredited year. And what does an accredited year mean? meaning it counts as a year
004for students to move towards graduation. It counts uh for staff for a years of service. It counts for school districts to be accredited uh with the state uh in those regards. So it is a compliance law that um the only negative or punitive action is not being accredited uh for that school year which is is a big deal and so we want to make sure that we take all that opportunity. Um so the next step we want to look at is how do we count days or hours um within our system. So when we have what's called professional development days on our calendar which is each Monday from 7:30 to 8:30 in the morning and then all the professional development days that you would see on the calendar those are counted as 0.5 for every
005hour or minute that we offer that on that day. So if our typical day is 410 minutes, which is what our uh or 405 minutes, which is what the length of our day is for our schools, we would be able to get 202.5 minutes of credit when we have a professional development day. Uh is considering student contact time. When we have teacher work days, that is zero. We don't get any time credited towards our 1,116 hours. When we have student contact days, we get one minute for every minute. um that happens and as we described in late starts we get uh half the time for PD and then every minute when students are in session and we have to measure all of those minutes by buildings. The other thing that I don't have here on
006this list is parent teacher conferences. So when we offer parent teacher conferences for every minute that we're in a parent teacher conference setting. So we normally go from like 4 to 7:30 at night. Each one of those minutes counts as a student contact minute towards our 1,116. So, we have a building secretary at each building that keeps their minutes in a monthly log and then we start working towards ensuring that we're going to meet those hours towards the end of the day. Now, when you have a snow day, when we call off school for inclement weather, you do not get to count those minutes. And so, that's where we have to really start uh tracking uh due to the amount that we missed this year. And so, what ended up happening is we our normal
007calendar has 1,160 hours uh built into it. And the amount of days that we missed so far this school year have put us below that threshold of 1,116 by a very small amount, but it puts us below the threshold of 1116. And so at the March 10th board meeting, the board decided uh to change our calendar and make sure that April 21st, which was going to be a non-school non- studentent contact day, we've changed that to a student contact date. Now, we do know that that was part of around Easter and that we were going to have a 4-day weekend and we do know that sometimes you have plans and those plans can change and we understand that. But we are still going to offer school to be in service on that day and we're
008still going to take attendance just like we would uh every day in doing that. It also will then affect the seniors last week because even adding in the April 21st, we are going to be short on our senior hours of 196. And so instead of the seniors normally on that last week of school before their graduation being done on Tuesday, they're going to have to go through Thursday of that last week, which is going to be um the May 9th in um in that area where they're going instead of getting out on Tuesday, which would normally be their last day, they're going to continue to go Wednesday and then Thursday will be their last day uh where they have graduation practice, uh do some of the work, getting checked out. uh and that will be
009their last day will be that Thursday before graduation. So, we had to make two different adjustments uh towards our calendar in doing that. As we've already adopted our calendar for next year, we still have our 1,160 hours uh built in and uh we're going to be able to prepare for that. But just know that when uh you have questions or communications around uh how many days do we have to make up, it's not days, it's based on the amount of hours. And so if our calculations are correct, which we're always continuing to audit them, and we just never know because each day and each month turns into a new calculation, um we're probably one to two hours short um potentially. We um in making that up. Plus, we get 13 hours forgiven because we will
010be attending school on marked inclement weather days. And what that does is that's an aotment from the state that you can mark uh up between two and five days in your calendar when you are in session. And if you are in session on those days, then you will get double the minutes. So instead of just getting 405, we would get 810 minutes, which allows us to go from being 13 hours 13 and 1/2 hours short to only being about an hour to an hour and a half short of what our 1116 is. So, by going to school on April 21st, we're going to ensure that we're well above our 1,116 hours so that we do not fall into a trap of not being accredited for next year. So, just like everything, we just want to
011be one degree more. And so, part of that is going to school on April 21st gives us an opportunity to be one degree more, have an opportunity to be in session for one day. And sometimes one thing that is lost is that when we don't have school on those snow days, our some of our classified staff that are hourly employees don't get paid uh for those days. And so this gives us an opportunity uh to provide them with one more day of work to be able to get uh paid um to help uh supplement some of the income that they missed from those snow days. So as always, I'm always will well well uh will willing and welcoming uh to anybody that wants to come visit. uh you can hit me up by calling the
012office and scheduling a time to meet or shoot me an email or hit me up on Twitter and we'll be able to communicate and answer any of your questions. If not, look forward to finishing this last quarter strong and having some exciting into the year to celebrate what a great year it is being one degree more. Thank you.