Superintendent's Corner for February 1, 2019

2-22-19

Parents and Students,

I am writing to communicate North Linn’s plan regarding making up snow days.  The original district calendar had 1162:50 hours planned over 169 student contact days.  The board recently approved a plan to finish the year with 1111:40 student contact hours, the district is required to attend a minimum of 1080 hours.

To date, the district has experienced 11 days canceled (this would include the cancellation of school next Wednesday when the girls play basketball at state) as well as the 8 days where school either started late or dismissed early, with possibly more to come.  Once we get past the threat of winter weather there will surely be some foggy mornings.

The 2018-2019 school calendar has been revised as noted and posted on our web site as follows:

• Monday, March 18 – will now become a student day

• Friday, March 29 – will now become a student day

• Thursday, April 18 – will now become a student day

• Tuesday, April 23 – will now become a student day

• Thursday, May 23 – will now become a student day

• Friday, May 24 – will now become a student day and be the last student day

Should the district end up with more schedule changes (this could be in the form of weather or additional state tournament days) then the district would need to go into the last week of May with students and if enough additional days were missed we could feasibly have students in June, which is not our goal.

So, currently with these revisions, our last student day will be Friday, May 24.  Stay tuned, any additional changes will be communicated and the calendar will be adjusted to reflect the changes and posted on our website.   We thank you for patience, I think many times it is forgotten of not only how the weather creates an inconvenience, but it also has an economic impact on you as many times you have to shorten your work schedule or take off from work, which creates another challenge.

Also as a side note, as I put this note together, a bill introduced in the Iowa House on Thursday would put a cap the time local school public and accredited non-public schools must make up at no more than five days, or 30 instructional hours. If this would have an effect on our revised calendar we will communicate that information out to you as soon as known.

Hang in there everyone, it surely is not as bad as when my parents had to walk or ride the horse to school in snow up to their hips and it was uphill both ways!  Thank you and stay safe from Mother Nature this weekend it is supposed to be another interesting one.