RISON - Both the Cleveland County and Woodlawn School Boards approved "waiver" resolutions Monday night that will allow their respective districts to use classroom time accumulated over the school year to serve as make-up time for the school days that were lost to last month's winter storm.
In addition, both districts applied for waivers to convert to an "alternative" school calendar for the 2024-25 school year. Those waivers will allow each district to create their school calendars based on the time spent in class each day rather than the number of school days in the year.
Under the state's new LEARNS Act, school districts are required to have 178 school days or 1,068 hours of instruction time in a school year. A school day, based on the act, is 6 hours of instruction time. Any instruction time beyond those 6 hours each day can be banked as time that can be used toward making up school days that may may be lost to inclement weather or other causes.
The waivers approved by both school boards this week allows both districts to use the extra time they have banked so far this year to be applied to the days they lost due to the winter storm. Cleveland County is having to make up five school days while Woodlawn is having to make up four.
With so many school districts across the state being forced to close for multiple days in the aftermath of the storm, Arkansas Education Secretary Jacob Oliva announced that the state would grant waivers to allow districts to switch from a daily calendar to an hourly calendar to use the extra time they may have banked had they used the hourly calendar. Both Cleveland County and Woodlawn schools are exceeding 6 hours of instruction time each school day.
Even though both districts have extra instruction time since the start of the school year that can be applied to the make-up days, both are still tweaking their class schedules to help make up even more time. Here is an overview of what ...
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