KNOXVILLE, Tenn. — Knox County Schools met Thursday and discussed their next steps after the school district ran out of inclement weather days. Students stayed home for more than a week as a deadly winter storm swept through the state, dumping several inches of snow and freezing roads in East Tennessee. The storm led to KCS using all eight of its available inclement weather days.
"It's been a long time since we've been in a scenario where the inclement weather days that we've planned, we've actually exhausted them," said Keith Wilson, who presented about the district's next steps. "Very rare that we would do this before the end of January."
He discussed "stockpile days," which are effectively a group of days that could be easily converted into normal instructional days so that the school district could take time for inclement weather. Wilson said Knox County Schools students can go to school for a longer period of time thaninitially planned to effectively bank hours that can be used in case of dangerous weather.
KCS has 13 stockpile days — eight days are for inclement weather and five are for "professional development days." Two professional development days are spread over the year for students to be released early, and the three others are in-service days.
There are three early-release days left in the year that can be converted into a single inclement weather day, and there is one in-service day that could be converted into an inclement weather day. He said converting the days would likely require the Board of Education to vote on a proposal.
"We're going to bring the plan to the board around these two days. If we found ourselves in a position where we had three more snow days that we had to have, then we would need to have additional plans," Wilson said.
In his presentation, he also said that if KCS exceeds the two additional days, the school district would add more instructional days to the end of the school year to make up for it — cutting into summer vacation.
If that happens, Wilson said another proposal would be presented to the board.