Date: 12-19-2016
For many school districts throughout Kentucky, snow days will be less disruptive to the learning process than they’ve been in the past.
With the Non-Traditional Instruction program, 72 districts will be providing work for students to keep them engaged in the event of a district-wide cancellation.
The Barren and Logan county school districts are the only systems in the Barren River area that have previously participated in the program, which allows districts to count non-traditional instruction days as full school days, according to Kentucky Department of Education data.
During the 2016-17 school year, Barren County Schools used three non-traditional instruction days, which the district calls iLearn@Home days, said Scott Harper, the district’s director of instruction and technology.
The district learned about the state’s non-traditional instruction days from other counties that had been involved with it before, Harper said.
“It kind of looked like an opportunity for us to try to address some of those days we were out of school,” he said.
After two years of having more snow days than normal, the district decided to try the program during the 2015-16 school year, he said.
“We were looking for ways to combat that out-of-school time,” he said.
Barren County Schools was approved for non-traditional instruction days, with district officials planning to use three to five of them, Harper said.
iLearn@Home days count as full school days, meaning the district doesn’t have to make them up later, he said.
According to Harper, having iLearn@Home days has been effective.
When students have multiple days off from school, they often aren’t fully ready to learn when they return, an effect that is lessened when students have review material to work with, he said.
“By keeping the material in front of the students, that keeps the instructional momentum moving forward,” he said.
As both a parent and a teacher with Barren County Schools, Jessica Dyer has seen a positive effect from the district’s iLearn@Home days.
An Advanced Placement U.S. history teacher at Barren County High School, Dyer said she used last year’s snow days to provide her students with review material assigned via Google Classrooms, which is due three days after school is back in session.
For students without Internet access, she makes sure that hard copies of the assignments are available beforehand, she said.
“We make these materials accessible in advance,” she said. “If it snows tomorrow, we’re ready.”
In addition to keeping recent material fresh in her students’ minds, the iLearn@Home days also allow them to look into subjects the class might not have time to cover during the school year.
Last school year, some students used their time away from the school building to research events from Asian history, like the Sepoy Rebellion against the British rule of India in 1857, to give them a more global perspective than the material’s largely Europe-focused view normally allows, Dyer said.
“I see a lot of benefit,” she said. “It keeps them on track.”
During iLearn@Home days, teachers are expected to make themselves available by phone or email to provide help for students that need it, Dyer said.
“From the time I got up to the time I went to bed, I was checking (my email) constantly,” she said, adding that she didn’t receive a great deal of requests for help during last year’s iLearn@Home days.
Dyer said she’s noticed that the review material has been good for her son, who was in first grade last year and struggles with math.
“I really liked having sheets for him to work on his math skills,” she said. “I think it helps him understand the purpose and keep going with it,” she said.
Born in the mountains
David Cook, director of innovation and partner engagement at the Department of Education, said former Education Commissioner Terry Holliday started the program because he was frustrated with the way the department handled missed school days.
“Basically, his idea was that districts would apply to the department to have school on days when school couldn’t happen,” he said.
In districts that don’t participate in the program, missed school days are typically added to the end of the school year, Cook said, adding that this approach usually results in the later school days’ instruction being of a lower quality.
“The kids are restless,” he said. “Everyone’s just ready for the school year to be over.”
Holliday thought allowing the students to learn and work on days school would ordinarily be canceled would mean more effective instruction, Cook said.
“It’s far better for us to do that than to take on days at the end of the year where we’re not certain about the quality of instruction,” he said.
Starting as a pilot program in Wolfe and Owsley counties in the 2011-12 school year, the Snowbound Program, as it’s unofficially called, originally was to give school districts in the mountainous Appalachian region in eastern Kentucky a reprieve from the dozens of snow days they can often expect each year, Cook said.
Having toured several eastern Kentucky districts, where the mountainous terrain makes snow and ice especially dangerous and makes clearing them away more difficult, Cook said there was a strong need for some of these districts to have non-traditional instruction days.
(In Lawrence County Dr. Rob Fletcher has experimented with a non-traditional schedule and says it is working well.)
“This program was originally intended for places like that but we know it has a lot of value statewide,” he said.
Owsley County Superintendent Tim Bobrowski said his district found out about the Snowbound Program when KDE was still looking for districts to participate in the pilot program and jumped right in.
“I was focused on the continuation of instruction,” he said. “We were missing 25 and 30 school days a year.”
In terms of student performance, the school has improved greatly over the past few years, thanks in part to the non-traditional instruction days, Bobrowski said.
“Six years ago, we were right above the point where the state was going to come in and bring the hammer down but now we’re a proficient school,” he said.
Owsley County Schools is ranked proficient according to KDE data, which divides schools and districts into three categories based on performance: needs improvement, proficient and distinguished.
Since its participation in the original pilot program, the opportunity to continue school lessons during snow days has been an “integral” part of the district’s operations, Bobrowski said.
The spread
Originally, a requirement that schools miss an average of 20 or more days per school year over the previous three years to be eligible for the program limited the program’s availability to districts in eastern Kentucky, Cook said.
However, the program started to spread after the state’s general assembly passed a bill that did away with this requirement in 2014, he said.
“That opened it up to all 173 school districts,” he said. “You could apply for non-traditional instruction days. It didn’t matter how many days you’d missed.”
Cook has gotten feedback from teachers suggesting that five continuous days out of school is effectively like losing eight school days because of the time it takes for teachers to get students “back into a learning mindframe,” he said.
Cook said he expects the program to continue spreading throughout the state, adding that in the last three years, the number of participating districts rose from 13 to 72.
“I think there are a lot of districts that are watching how it’s working for other districts,” he said.
Though the program began as an effort to keep schools from having to make up snow days, they can be used for other school-cancelling events like floods, according to Beth Peterson, a branch manager with KDE’s division of innovation and partner engagement.
Earlier this year for instance, McCreary County Public Schools, a first-time participating district, used a few non-traditional learning days when school was canceled due to smoke drifting into the area from wildfires in Tennessee, she said.
According to Department of Education data, 27 Kentucky school districts are participating in the program for the first time this school year and 44 districts that have previously been involved, are returning.
In the Barren River area, the Hart, Allen, Edmonson and Simpson county school districts are participating in the program for the first time this school year, according to the data.
Angela Frank, an instruction supervisor with Hart County Schools, said the district decided to give non-traditional instruction days a try after having nine snow-related cancellations last school year.
“We saw a need with the weather issues in the past and we thought it was a wonderful opportunity for kids to keep learning during those days,” she said.
The Department of Education has approved the district for up to ten non-traditional instruction days, Frank said.
When students are out of school for a number of days consecutively, it impedes the learning process,” she said.
“We’re hoping this will allow kids to maintain that academic progress,” she said.
By Jackson French
Bowling Green Daily News
