Brown County Schools students got a surprise winter break last week.

Students were not in class for five days straight thanks to snow, extreme cold and hazardous road conditions.

Students had one eLearning day on Monday, Feb. 15 where they worked on assignments at home, but under the district’s eLearning policy, the rest of the days were snow days, meaning they would have to be made up at the end of the school year.

Last week, the school board approved a modification to the eLearning policy for the remainder of this school year.

If school has to be closed on consecutive days, then snow days will be used until the district hits five snow days. Currently, three have been used.

Once the district hits five snow days, it can apply for a waiver from the Indiana Department of Education. Then, if school has to be closed again for consecutive days, the days would alternate between eLearning days and waiver days. Waiver days do not need to be made up.

“If we have day number six after the (fifth) snow make-up day, that would be an eLearning day. Day seven would be a waiver, day eight would be an eLearning day, day nine would be a waiver, day 10 would be an eLearning day,” Superintendent Laura Hammack said.

She said that this plan to use a mix of waiver days and eLearning days was a result of feedback from the Brown County Educators Association whose members wanted to revisit the eLearning policy.

“We had some educators who wanted us to be thoughtful about deploying more eLearning days to not have to add on as many days at the end of the year,” she said.

“We (also) have educators who don’t want that, and very much want to ensure as many days of instruction in person are offered to our students and to their families.”

This plan was a “blending of both worlds,” while also trying to keep the last day of school before graduation the same.

At this point, the official last day of school will be Tuesday, May 25.

Brown County High School graduation is set for Friday, May 28.

“We would really like to build a model that doesn’t get us (in school) past graduation, because that is just complicating for so many reasons,” Hammack said.

“Even in the circumstances of the pandemic, we still have families who have already made arrangements, even though our graduation plans are not set yet, but arrangements for some family gatherings and the like. We’ve been trying to be thoughtful about all of those different implications.”

The school board also approved modifying the second trimester end date from Feb. 19 to March 5. “This is in direct response to the number of snow days that have accumulated over these last couple of weeks,” Hammack said.

Waiver days

Last fall, the school board allowed the district to apply for a waiver from the Indiana State Board of Education that would allow them to count the school calendar in minutes instead of days.

“We were concerned about what COVID would ultimately imply as we were headed into the winter months,” Hammack said.

Students in middle and high school are required to have 360 minutes of instruction a day. Elementary-aged students are required to have 300 minutes of instruction a day. After doing the math, the district as a whole had students engaged in four more days of instruction than what was required via state statute.

The SBOE allowed the district to deploy those four extra days this winter season. The four waiver days applied for the closures on Feb. 2, 10, 11 and 16.

“That means they do not need to be a make-up day or an eLearning day,” Hammack explained.

“We were able to pull off some of those added days at the end of the calendar that were really starting to make us nervous as we were getting closer and closer to graduation.”

The school board also approved giving teachers and staff emergency pay for those four waiver days since they will not be made up at the end of the school year.

For the educators who wanted to be in the classroom instead of doing eLearning days, the compromise was to allow the remaining snow makeup days at the end of the school calendar to be used, if needed, before switching to the rotating waiver-and-eLearning-day schedule.

School was called off due to weather again on Feb. 19, which means the district now has the potential for two more snow make-up days between now and graduation.

eLearning input

In addition to weather, depending on what school they attend, Brown County students have missed between two and 14 days of in-person instruction due to COVID-19 schedule changes this school year. They had eLearning assignments to complete at home on those days instead.

Not all parents are available to help students with those assignments if they need it, and students have varying levels of access to the internet outside of school.

“We have abysmal engagement on eLearning days,” Hammack told the school board. “Many students aren’t engaging. That is really hard to see as an educator.”

Other families, though, are able to doing the hard work it takes to complete eLearning assignments, she added.

At the beginning of next school year, Hammack said that a task force will be created to revisit the eLearning policy altogether since this modification was approved for this school year only. This would be “to get parent input, teacher input and student input, so we might be able to develop an eLearning policy that makes sense for our community,” she said.

For this school year, a decision just had to be made due to the graduation date approaching, she said.

“We’re trying to make sure we can come up with a cycle that really makes sense for our seniors, our families, while simultaneously ensuring the student experience is one that is as valuable as we can make it,” Hammack said.