Council Rock To Apply For Five Flexible Instructional Days

NEWTOWN, PA — The Council Rock administration will have another tool at its disposal when deciding how to handle the impact of prolonged severe winter weather events and emergency situations on its school calendar.

During a special meeting Thursday night, the school board gave Superintendent Dr. Andrew Sanko and his team permission to reapply to the state for five flexible instructional days per year over the next three years .

The flexible instructional days would give the administration the option of using at home asynchronous instruction after it has exhausted all eight snow days built into the calendar and to prevent the end of the school year from extending much past the third week of June.

The state allows districts to use up to five flexible instructional days in a school year. The district's last application for use of the days was submitted to the Pennsylvania Department of Education during the 2020-21 school year.

While the administration said its priority will be to keep students in school, it asked the board for permission to apply for the days as a last resort option to prevent its end of the year school calendar from extending much beyond the third week in June.

"The priority of the Council Rock School District is to keep students in school. We are coming before you this evening to simply ask that this be an option if we need it in the future," said the district's director of elementary education Nicole Crawford.

"I have not consulted the almanac so I have no idea what the weather will look like next year," said Al Funk, the district's director of secondary education. "We were fortunate to have had a very mild winter this year, but this is really a contingency plan should we have severe weather - a blizzard situation or a number of cumulative snow closure days such that our school calendar would be pushed into late June.

"This would give the administration the opportunity to potentially use some of those days, in consultation with the school board, to eliminate that late June calendar," said Funk.

"We do not foresee utilizing these days for one-off situations," he added. "It would not be utilized for a singular school closure like a power outage at Sol Feinstone. That would not be the intention of the flexible instructional days. This would be a district-wide use only and it would be reserved for situations where we had an inordinate amount of snow closure days - a blizzard or such a severe winter that our June calendar would be impacted."

In the event a flexible instruction day is used, student participation would be required, said Crawford. The instruction would be done asynchronously with secondary students using Canvas and elementary students using Google classroom to access instruction.

"Those classrooms are already set up so it would work easily to be able to post, as we have done in the past, assignments and activities," said Crawford. "A contingency plan would be made so that in the event of teachers, students and parents not being able to access anything on line hard copy assignments, projects, etc., would be sent home ahead of time. We typically do that now anyway."

Superintendent Sanko said in the event of back-to-back storms or a Hurricane Sandy situation that exhaust the district's eight snow days, "we'd be talking to the board saying, 'What do you think of using a flexible instructional day because we are going up against that third or fourth week in June?"

Five board members - Yota Palli, Bob Hickey, Joseph Hidalgo, Dr. Stephen Nowmos and board president Ed Salamon - voted in favor of the motion.

'This gives me bad memories from the COVID years," said Salamon. "I sat and watched my kids at home doing asynchronous work ... Begrudging I'm going to vote for this because I trust this administration to do what's best for the kids."

"It absolutely makes sense to me. It provides us with another tool in our hands," said board member Palli. "Being at school is the best education. We all know about educational loss and bad memories from the last couple of years, but for me this is not about that. This is just voting for the administration to get access from the state to have one more tool in our tool kit in case it's absolutely necessary to use it."

Two board members Mike Thorwart and Michael Roosevelt voted against the motion.

"I want to give you the tool," Thorwart told the administration. "We know these (online instructional) days don't work. We spent a couple of years doing this and we've spent this year with learning loss. I'm a little more appeased that you're talking about this as being a last resort kind of thing. I will note that we had a district near us that decided to use one to make Memorial Day a four day weekend. I don't want to see that," he said. "And I don't want to use them unless we absolutely need to because we know they don't work."

Roosevelt added, "I'm glad to hear the administration wants to keep kids in school. I would like to exhaust other areas. If the whole point is to get kids out of school in early June, I would rather look at other areas of our calendar. Education and the kids' education is what we're here for. I don't support this. We figured out how to get around this before 2019. Why can't we sort that out now?"

In addition, Roosevelt said using the instructional days requires a lot of paperwork and a lot of time expended by the school district's administration, which is not compensated by the state.