BECKLEY, ,W.Va. — The state Board of Education will decide Wednesday if it will grant waivers to 27 county school systems who want relief from the 180-day school calendar requirement.
Raleigh County students missed two weeks of school in February because of one storm after another and the county school board has applied for one of those waivers, but board president Rick Snuffer isn’t optimistic.
“The waiver rules that the state board sent out to us were so tight,” Snuffer recently told MetroNews. “We applied for it, but I doubt they’re going to grant it.”
Gov. Earl Ray Tomblin has made his stance clear on the issue.
“People have been talking the talk for years. He’s now saying, ‘Walk the walk. You need to have your students in there 180 days,'” Tomblin administration Communications Director Chris Stadelman said last Friday on MetroNews Talkline.
Snuffer said Raleigh County students will most likely be looking at a short summer. Snow days have already pushed the last day of school to June 22 with the first day of school set for Aug. 12. Snuffer said that the county was given the option to make up days on holidays or Saturdays, but he explained that it just wasn’t feasible.
“The problem with that is we have service personnel and stuff, we have to pay them overtime to work those extra days,” he explained. “You could bring in the teachers, but your bus drivers, cooks, and other folks you couldn’t do it.”
Snuffer said that each day, school instruction goes a half hour longer than required and he had hoped that those extra hours could be counted toward making up snow days.
The state Board of Education will make the final decision on the waiver requests but the governor’s stance is clear Stadelman repeated on Talkline Friday.
“If somebody wants to come on your show after me and say that a trip to Myrtle Beach or a trip to Disney World is more important than a child’s education, I invite them to do that,” Stadelman said. “We understand people want family time, everybody has the entire month of July off.”