Snow Days Don’t Penalize Students, Yet

Before Winter Break ended, the Centennial School District called Monday and Tuesday as snow days. The main question now, however, is how does it affects the rest of the school year?

“At this point we meet [the] requirements for the state through the department of education,” said Assistant Principal Mark Porterfield. “If we miss any more days we’ll probably have to have a conversation on that, and that would be a decision of our superintendent and our school board.”

To focus on the high school, all classes have built-in days in case of weather or other phenomenon, with seniors having a separate slot because of graduation and having already reserved facilities for that event. Since the District must meet the required number of minutes per day, anything below the minimum will be taken into account.  But, according to Porterfield, this is not an issue so far.

An example of added school days would be just across the river.  Several Vancouver, Washington schools received multiple days off from school due to late snow falls in March and had to add days on at the end of the year.

The only way that senior graduation would be moved, on the other hand, is if we were hit by a blizzard or had any “act of god” were to greatly increase the number of missed days, and even in that situation it would start as a discussion and not an exact decision due to the many factors involved.