Unlike students in many school districts across the state and some in the surrounding area, students in the Clinton County School District–despite one of the harshest winter’s in several years, will be out of class before the Memorial Day weekend. That also goes for the 2014 CCHS graduation.

Clinton County Board of Education made the closing day of school and graduation date official last Tuesday, April 15 during a call meeting when they unanimously approved the current 2013-14 school year calendar. That will reflect the last day for students to be Thursday, May 22 and Clinton County High School graduation the following night, Friday, May 23.

Director of Pupil Personnel Julie York explained the changes in the calendar to the board–again, at last week’s meeting. She told the board that due to the recent weather conditions in Kentucky, the state had opted to allow school districts which used no school facilities as polling places on election day, to hold classes on election day for the purpose of makeup days.

Since no schools are used for voting purposes in Clinton County, students will attend class on election day, Tuesday, May 20 allowing the last instructional day to be May 22 and also allow graduation to proceed on May 23. The official closing day for faculty in the district is slated for May 28.

Changing the school calendar was nothing new for the board, as revisions had been presented and approved earlier in the year. However, the winter weather continued to play havoc with the school calendar, causing the district to miss at least 14 days.

The board, in earlier changes, had incorporated days back into the calendar to use as make-up days and by doing so, was able to keep the closing of schools locally in the month of May and even before Memorial Day.

The board first revised the school calendar back in January, when only a handful of days had been missed and at that time, only one instructional day had to be added to the school year. At that time, the four remaining “Early Release Days” were made class days and one work day for teachers was omitted and added as an instructional day.

At that point, the last day of classes was tentative for May 8. However, snow, ice and winter weather didn’t let up and by early March, a total of 11 days had been missed–putting a projected closing day for students at May 19–and eventually, with the final blast of winter weather later that month, three additional days were missed.

Fortunately, with the state allowing election day to be used as a make-up date, there was no need for a “break” in classes, and allows students to begin summer break a day earlier and avoid having classes on the same date as scheduled high school graduation.

Also during last week’s meeting, the board voted to make a slight revision to next year’s school calendar, the 2014-15 calendar, that being making the May 2015 primary election an “off” day for students.