Lost school days are hard for systems to make up and hurt learning

Metro Atlanta school district calendars vary widely, depending upon money available to pay teachers and the days they decided to close for weather. Here’s a sampling of days lost. (Some districts will try to make up lost time and, where possible, those days are noted. Some district makeup efforts may not be included here.)

Days lost

Bad weather and budget cuts have cost students in metro Atlanta anywhere from a few days to a couple of weeks of missed school, with possible consequences for their academic performance.

This week, the state Board of Education may waive the days lost to snow and ice from the number required — 180 generally. But the waivers likely will come at a cost. Each day missed has a measurable effect on test scores, studies have shown.

Compounding the weather cancellations, many districts started the school year with calendars shortened by waivers for budget shortfalls.

“I’m really concerned,” said Sarah Lyons, the mother of two small children in Cobb County, which will have lost 11 days by the time students return after a teacher furlough day Tuesday. “They’ve missed a lot of school.”

While some districts may write off the lost time, others, such as Gwinnett and Rockdale counties and city of Decatur, are trying to make up at least some of it, scheduling school on days previously set aside for teacher training or other breaks. It’s a challenge finding enough days before high-stakes spring testing to undo all the damage without a drastic and surely controversial step like canceling spring break.

Cobb, Georgia’s second largest district, started the school year with a shortened calendar because of five teacher furlough days, then canceled six days during the three weather events so far this year: the cold snap that delayed resumption of classes after New Year’s Day, the first snow storm in late January and the second one last week.

Cobb would have lost more time to weather, but two of its furlough days happened to come at the end of last week, overlapping days when most districts were closed for the winter storm.

DeKalb County, the state’s third largest district, is also down 11 days: three because of teacher furloughs and eight for weather.

The lost learning time can be devastating for some students, especially in math, studies have shown.

Dave Marcotte, a public policy researcher, studied the effect of weather closures on elementary school students and found a quarter of 1 percent of them failed their high-stakes math test for each day lost. “So 2 or 3 percent (of) kids, if you lose a couple weeks, are not going to pass the math assessment,” said Marcotte, a professor at the University of Maryland.

Marcotte’s research partner, Benjamin Hansen, an assistant economics professor at the University of Oregon, drew a comparison between the effect of missed days and crowded classrooms: Making up 11 lost days, he said, would have the same effect on performance as reducing class sizes from 23 students to 14.

Makeup days must be well-timed to help, Marcotte said. It makes little sense to add missed days after testing, since those days won’t affect scores and, once testing is over, some students may be coasting toward summer. He said the best response is probably to lengthen each school day, since research supports the positive effect of longer days at some charter schools.

The state school board will get a resolution Thursday from state Superintendent John Barge requesting a calendar waiver for all districts that closed during the snow and ice emergencies this year, Education Department spokesman Matt Cardoza said.

Makeup time would cost little since the major expense — teacher pay — typically would not increase. That’s because teachers usually get annual contracts that pay them to work a fixed number of days regardless of when they occur, said Tekshia M. Ward-Smith, the human resources chief for DeKalb schools. Teachers won’t be paid for any snow days that are made up later, she said, because “we’ve already paid for those days.”

DeKalb Superintendent Michael Thurmond said the district is considering three options: writing off the lost time, adding days back to the calendar, or adding minutes to the end of each day. He said the second option, adding days back, would be difficult in the time remaining before the statewide CRCT and end-of-course tests. “You run into people’s vacations,” he said.

The Decatur city school board Friday authorized its superintendent to implement longer school days. A spokeswoman said Superintendent Phyllis Edwards is planning to add 30 minutes per day to make up three of eight days lost to weather. The district, which reopened Friday but is closed this week for winter break, already scheduled two makeup days for the cold snap in early January, leaving three lost days.

Also Friday, the school board in Rockdale County, which has lost eight days to weather since last month and has 10 furlough days, voted to cancel a weeklong winter break that was to begin Monday and added another makeup day in March.

Cobb schools spokesman Jay Dillon said teachers already are compensating for some of the time lost to budget cuts. Dillon said the five teacher furlough days that were cut from the calendar to save money are not really “missed” instructional time “because our teachers went into the school year knowing about the furloughs and adjusted their curriculum delivery accordingly.”

But Connie Jackson, a Cobb teacher and parent, dismissed that argument. Teachers did speed up the pace of their courses, she said, but there is a “point of saturation where you cannot cram any more into a school day.”

Jackson, who is president of the Cobb County Association of Educators, said her son’s teacher was frantically sending text messages during the recent weather outage, encouraging him to study online.

“Teachers are very, very concerned about the loss of instructional time,” Jackson said. “There’s a lot of worry that kids won’t be ready for testing.”