Summer vacation won’t start early this year.
Amid rumors the Warren County School System would end the school year a few days early, incoming Director of Schools Bobby Cox said the full calendar will be completed with the last day still next Friday, May 25.
“We may look at converting some regular school days to professional development days in the future, but it’s too late in the game to do anything this year,” said Cox. “Kindergarten graduation is coming up Thursday night and a lot of things are happening at the end of the year so we’re not going to be able to do it this year.”
The talk of converting school days to professional development days started because Warren County has nine bad weather days stockpiled. The school system started the year with 11 and because of an extremely mild winter only used two of them.
Cox said there was correspondence with the Tennessee Commissioner of Education to see about converting stockpiled bad weather days into teacher development days. Cox said he also sought feedback from school officials.
“We started calling principals to see what they had to say about it and we made the request to the commissioner just to see if it’s allowable,” said Cox. “But the state is pretty strict about what can be considered professional development. You can’t just be stapling things to a bulletin board.”
Cox also said teachers will be pressed to get TCAP scores figured into the final grades of students. This is the first year the state has mandated the standardized test scores to be part of the final grade. Cox said teachers are going to have to hustle to get report cards done by next Friday and closing schools early would make that more difficult.
The idea of ending the school year early was only considered because of the bad weather days remaining. If all 11 days were used, Cox said it would not be an option.
“It fluctuates from year to year. Some years we use all the days and other years we don’t,” said Cox. “We can’t predict the weather.”