School districts call half days ahead of storm

PHOTOGRAPHER: Erica Miller

Rose Janicke, 9, of Wilton, sleds down a hill last week on McGregor Golf Club in Wilton.

School districts across the Capital Region announced Tuesday that they would hold half days of school Wednesday as a snowstorm bears down on the region.

The notices of early dismissal started rolling in the early afternoon and by the evening most districts in the area had announced students would be dismissed sometime before noon Wednesday. The Schenectady City School District had not announced a scheduling decision as of 5:30 p.m.

State regulations require at least five hours of instruction for a day to count toward the 180-day requirement, but other regulations provide an exemption to that rule for “extraordinary adverse weather conditions.”

Some area districts have nearly maxed out the number of snow days they built into their school calendars. Duanesburg Central School District, for example, had used four snow days so far this year, with five allotted in the calendar. Schalmont has four allotted snow days and has used three of them so far this year.

But other schools still had a healthy cushion before running up against scheduling challenges. In Scotia-Glenville schools, the annual calendar schedules 186 instruction days; with three snow days used so far this winter, the district still has three days it can use to close school for weather or an emergency.

It was not clear Tuesday at press time whether Wednesday’s half days would constitute instructional days or would be counted as a snow days.