Snow Days
We had to have one last snow day on Wednesday. Hopefully, that is the last one for this year. I've had several people ask how that day will be made up. The board will be discussing it at a special meeting on Monday, April 30th. I plan to recommend to them that we go until 2:15 on Friday, May 25th and then not make up the student day on Tuesday. The staff will still meet on Tuesday, May 29th to finalize grades, clean their rooms, and make sure everything is put away for summer. These are things that are normally done after the students leave at 11:15 on the last day. We were scheduled to dismiss at 11:15 anyway, so we would only be missing four hours of instruction. Three from the last day and one from dismissing an hour early on Friday. With our weather related early outs, late starts, and this last day, we will have missed 18 hours of instruction that will not be made up. Fortunately, we have enough extra hours built into our calendar to address this.
The state requires us to attend 180 days of school or have 1,080 hours of instruction. We go with hours of instruction and regularly create a calendar with additional hours above the 1,080. This gives us the flexibility to adjust the calendar in this way. I've had people ask why we go above the 1,080 and this year that answer becomes clear. Look for the official announcement after the April 30th Special Board meeting, but I expect the last student day will be Friday, May 25th with a 2:15 dismissal.
Other Thoughts
The contractor's pouring 47 yards of contract for the Northeast corner of the new addition today. Fortunately, they had the forms up prior to the snow. Hopefully, the weather will straighten up so they can keep moving on the project. Of course, nice weather will help the other projects that are happening around town as well. It truly is a great time to be in New Hampton.We did get the quote for the change order on expanding the Ag/Industrial Technology space in the new building. It came in at $282,000. As you may recall, the board voted earlier to hold off spending any district funds until after the project was complete so we are sure on the amount of money that will be available. However, we've had some community members working with our staff to look into raising these funds privately. The board approved allowing them to look into that, but did not commit any district funds to the project. Some people are wondering what this extra space would be used for and why wasn't it included in the original project. It wasn't in the original project as we were building a project as large as we thought we could afford. The original bids included a smaller gymnasium with an option to make it larger if bids came in low enough. If the AG/IT addition had been planned to be larger, the gym possibly may have ended up smaller as the bids would have been higher and the available funds may not have been there. The AG/IT space was certainly large enough to meet our needs and will be no matter what the outcome will be. However, I think our staff sees some ways to expand opportunities for our students as we increase our partnerships with local industries, work more with NICC, and move toward a Chickasaw Manufacturing Model.
The year is quickly winding down. We've missed a lot of track and golf meets so far. I hope the weather stays nice so our athletes can finish with a strong season. The lack of events creates a number of issues. One is with the Drake relays that are scheduled for next week. Normally, our track athletes would have a number of opportunities to qualify by running in a number of events by yesterday, the last day to qualify. With all of the cancellations, the number of opportunities has been reduced so I suspect we and most Northern Iowa schools will see less participants this year then in the past. It's no one's fault, just a part of Iowa's weather. Hopefully, the golf, track, and trapshooters have clear weather from here on out and can finish their seasons strong.
