The DeKalb County School District will lengthen its school days by 20 minutes October through December to make up for closing four days last week due to Hurricane Irma.
This has been done before by other metro districts. Gwinnett and Decatur extended their school days for 30 minutes in 2014 after ice and snow crippled the region and forced all schools to shut down. In 2014, DeKalb chose to add days to the end of the year to make up for that lost time.
Writing about schools after the 2014 storm that stranded motorists and school buses for up to 18 hours on paralyzed highways, I reported that days lost to weather take a toll on academic performance:
In an academic year with five snow day closures, the study found that "the number of 3rd graders performing satisfactorily on state reading and math assessments within a school is nearly 3 percent lower than in years with no school closings. The impacts of closure are largest in mathematics and for students in lower grades."
It may be more palatable for districts to tack extra time onto the end of the year to compensate for snow days. However, that amounts to just filling seats, since there's little going on during the final days of school when testing is over and grades are submitted.
As noted in the snow day study, "Simply extending the year well after assessments are given might mean that students and teachers spend more days filling (or killing) time before the end of the year. This would make improvements in learning unlikely, and presumably make students unhappy for no good reason."
Some districts are considering adding minutes to each day to make up for the lost time, but the National Center for Time and Learning, a Boston-based nonprofit that advocates adding instructional hours for students, says that's not an effective substitute for whole class periods.
Here is the official statement from DeKalb
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