Storms brew trouble for end of school year
May 6, 2014
The 2013-14 school year has brought more cancellations due to weather conditions than ever before. This year, West Fargo High School (WFHS) has run out of storm makeup days, and is adding a day on to the end of the school year, the day after finals.
“No one [could] ever really predict that we’d have so many snow days, it was kind of an unusual year,” WFHS Principal, Jennifer Fremstad said. “School districts kind of have their hands tied. The state requires us to meet a certain number of days with our students and we’re tied in. When we don’t have a day of school, it’s going to be made up somewhere else.”
The West Fargo Public School District sets aside three storm days before school starts, but this year, after deciding not to use the Feb. 18th makeup date, the makeup day was set for May 30th, which is also the day of graduation rehearsal.
“We have such a large district and so many families it’s hard [to] change the calendar once the year gets going because I’m sure that families and other people have made plans around it,” West Fargo Assistant Superintendent Allen Burgad said. “Sometimes you have unfortunate storms. We have to adjust and adapt and really that’s what resulted in us having to go that last day.”
Fortunately, the high school schedule is flexible due to finals, and administrators decided to utilize the last day for makeup finals so teachers can easily finalize grades before graduation.
“I think we’ve got a great set of teachers who will do what they need to do for finals week and get their grades finalized,” Fremstad said. “I don’t see it as a huge hiccup for us, I think it’s much more challenging when you don’t have that finals schedule and you have days of teaching because that additional day of teaching looks different at the middle level and at the elementary, so they might be more uncomfortable with it.”
Chemistry teacher Aaron Tank continually keeps up with the schedule changes and is not surprised at the storms or the additional day at the end of the year.
“It’s kind of common,” Tank said. “Storm days like these have to be built in to make sure that there something in line to make room for storms later in the year, especially in this state.”
Besides having school on May 30th, the cancellation of school on March 31st placed another roadblock before the district, as no other storm makeup days were left. Luckily, WFHS was granted a waiver from the Governor for missing that day.
“I think the conversation that has to happen is what days are first and second and third storm days,” Fremstad said. “It was an exceptional year and it’s created a kind of a new set of questions that need answers because of it everybody’s asking the questions now.”
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