Gateway Regional School District Superintendent Dr. David B. Hopson.
The school committee has approved the 2017-2018 school calendar as well as the continuation of the use of ‘Blizzard Bags’ for the 2017-2018 school year. The next school year will therefore start for students on Wednesday, August 30th and we hope will end on or before Monday, June 18th. The approved calendar maintains school vacations for the December/January Holiday season, the winter break in February, and a spring break in April. The approved calendar is on the district’s website to view as well as in a printable format.
The use of blizzard bags this year allowed the district to have five days of student work during weather cancellations count for school attendance days thus eliminating having students extend the school year five days later into June. So, despite having eight, weather related cancellations this school year, we only had to add three days to the scheduled last day of school. The presentation provided to the school committee can also be found on the district’s website that includes some of the initial results from parent and teacher surveys while the summary of all three surveys will become available in the near future.
We certainly appreciate all of the students, parents and teachers that took the time to take the survey, share their thoughts, and offer suggestions for improvements. In reviewing attendance data and information from the surveys, we found that we had an overall completion rate for blizzard bag assignments across the district of over 91%. We also found that nearly 60% of students favored maintaining or expanding the program while 63.5% of parents and 86.2% of teachers responded in the same manner. We also noted that the majority of respondents agreed with the statements that the use of blizzard bag days were made appropriately and that the process became easier as we moved through the year. Based upon this information, the district will continue assigning blizzard bags as we did this year, i.e., if we have two snow days in a row, only one will be a blizzard bag day, we won’t have more than two blizzard bag assignments in a week, and we’ll keep the number of days to complete the work at five school days (which means any assignment will also include a weekend thus ensuring at least seven days to complete assignments).
We also found that the majority of respondents agreed that blizzard bag assignments were related to the curriculum and teaching occurring in the classroom, that the work assigned approximated the amount of work done in school, and that using these assignments to count towards both the class grade and overall attendance was appropriate.
The survey respondents also indicated that the blizzard bag process would be easier to create, implement and complete if our member towns had broadband internet available. This seems to be an additional reason to add to all of the other reasons for our towns to move forward with implementing broadband internet access in an expedited manner. The survey data also provided some good feedback on how the program can be improved and the district will be implementing some changes based upon this information. Overall the district is pleased by the information we gathered through this process, that the program was received well, that we met our main objective related to the work being academically relevant and that as a related benefit the district saved approximately $55,000 using blizzard bags. For more details on the use of blizzard bags be sure to review the school committee presentation as well as the final survey report.
