Clinton County will be able to make up most if not all of the 13 days missed so far due to winter weather, and not have to extend this year’s school session into June.

But considering that the winter season is still less than one-half behind us, and none of the missed days have been due to flu or other illness outbreaks, a final day for the 2010-2011 term is not much more than theory at this point.

Clinton County Super-intendant Micky McFall recently sat down with the News, along with Transportation Director Larry Koger and went over the recent school closings due to weather conditions.

As of press time, Clinton County schools will be in session until May 27, 2011.

McFall said the days that were missed, 13 total, will affect the total length of the 2010-2011 school year.

“It’s a big topic right now,” McFall said. “The rule in Clinton County is graduation has to occur after the last student day. The way we do graduation is we tie Project Graduation in with it in order to allow parents and community members to take part, so it needs to be on a weekend. Otherwise, we could have it on the last day students were in school.”

Clinton County students are now at almost three weeks of classes in terms of missed days and the weather doesn’t seem like it’s letting up anytime soon. Weather conditions were predicted to once again take aturn for the worse as this week progresses with snow possibly moving in Wednesday night and temperatures remaining colder throughout the week.

“We are at 13 days right now … missed. We had built in our original calendar this year, 14 make-up days, because you have to use the most number of days you’ve missed in the last five years,” McFall said. “Last year we missed 14 days. What we did was build 10 of those days in the later part of May. We then looked at our spring break. The board will be discussing this in our board meeting on February 14.”

McFall said anything mentioned in this article about which days were to be used could change depending on the direction the school board decided to go after options are given and discussed in the regular scheduled meeting for February.

“We can be pretty much assured we will be in school until May 27,” McFall said. “If we extend the year out to May 27, we will be able to make up 10 lost days of instruction. We can’t go to school, at least for students, on election day, which is May 17. We can use that day for professional development day, but not for a student day.”

McFall said those 10 days the district is able to make-up, is not including spring break, usually held in March.

“The options after that could include extending school into June or taking some days from spring break,” McFall said. “We do have one more day we could deal with and that is President’s Day on February 21. Right now we have that as a day out of school. We can make that a student instructional day and I think the board will probably be agreeable to that.”

Changing President’s Day to an instructional day will give Clinton County 11 makeup days, leaving only two days remaining in missed instruction.

“I will probably recommend to the board that we go to school on at least two days in the spring break,” McFall said. “That will still get us out on May 27.”

During this school year, McFall said there has been legislation passed to allow flexibility in school calendars.

According to the Kentucky Laws, if a school calendar contains a minimum of 1,062 hours of instruction with at least 170 days, the calendar will be approved.

If the school calendar contains a minimum of 1,062 hours of instruction with less than 170 days of instruction, the calendar will be submitted to Kentucky Department of Education for approval.

“There can be time added to the day to make up for lost instructional time,” McFall said. “We will still have to be over a certain number of instructional days, but I think that may be an option for us also. That may be something we talk about on the 14th.”

Making a decision on whether or not school will be held is a decision that is usually made between the hours of four a.m. to five a.m.

Both Koger and McFall look at weather patterns, radar and other weather tools, like the KY Mesonet, to determine if road conditions are safe for buses to run with McFall making the final decision.

“The hard days are the days that it isn’t doing anything, but it’s predicted” Koger said. “It’s hard to make a decision before the precipitation actually gets here.”

Koger said if the weather is putting out precipitation during the morning hours, he will run the roads to determine the conditions.

“I call Mr. McFall and tell him what I see and a lot of times he is already out. He will get out around four a.m. and look at roads on the north end of the county,” Koger said. “There are a lot of things that go into his decision.”

“There are a lot of factors that come into play, but there is one that is really important which is the student safety,” McFall said. “When the final decision is made and Larry and I are talking, we ultimately have to ask ourselves do we feel like it’s safe for buses to run?”

Having the decision to call off school is a big one and much is to be considered when the final call is made.

“Every day is different,” McFall said. “Sometimes if it is okay at four a.m. it might not be okay at six a.m. which is run time. The coldest time is right at daybreak, so you have to consider if the roads are wet, is it going to freeze over, even though they are fine at 4:30 a.m. You have to consider the forecast of not only temperate, but also if there is going to be precipitation coming in at that time or later in the day.”

McFall said the school system has experienced a forecast of precipitation arriving during the middle of the day this year. He said they were lucky that it didn’t get to Clinton County until after the buses had made their runs.

“We saw schools drop like dominoes to the west of us. We looked at it nearly the whole day and we felt like we could keep school in, get the buses out and deliver all the students, which is typically around four p.m. when they are finished,” McFall said. “I think it got here about 4:30 p.m. We made a good call there. We kept kids in school. We would like for all of them to work out that way, but sometimes we miss it a little bit, but we want to make sure we put students in a position to be safe as much as possible.”

Clinton County uses 25 buses per day to transport around 1,200 students to and from school for around 2,000 miles per day of transportation. Keeping those students safe is something McFall and Koger take very seriously.

As far as cancelling school after a particular system has hit, McFall said they can usually determine if the roads will be safe on the day before.

“By two o’clock, most of the clearing has occurred and you have to start thinking about the likelihood of it starting to freeze back over,” McFall said. “One thing I’m sure people don’t realize, is once 90 (KY Hwy 90) and 127 (U.S. 127) are clear, well, that’s just the beginning. Most of our buses travel a lot of very rural type roads that the state and county just can not get to quickly. I’m sure they do at some point, but when they’ve not been treated or scraped, it takes a little longer for those to clear.”

McFall said other considerations to take into account is where buses are able to turnaround on certain roads.

“Sometimes buses have to back onto areas that are not paved and so those areas are not cleared,” McFall said. “That slows down our ability to make our complete routes. We don’t have a snow plan for buses. We are going to either reach all the students or none at all.”

Other than McFall and Koger, others are considered when making the final decision.

“Early in the morning we will call the state highway garage and the county and talk about the conditions,” Koger said. “If they can give us a good indication then they will say “we treated it … it’s clear.” About the first person I call is dispatch and ask if anyone has reported any slick road conditions.”

The Clinton County Board of Education will meet on Tuesday, February 14, 2011 at the Board of Education office. That meeting is open to the public.