By John Raffel
Correspondent
MARION – Marion school superintendent Steve Brimmer said the district has had to cancel 12 days in total this school year so far.
“Some were due to weather, some were due to Covid, some were due to power outages and some were due to school threats,” he said. As it currently stands, we would need to make up five days of school. However, we could see some relief in terms of makeup days legislatively.” On the process to determine a snow day, “we have the transportation director and our head maintenance person check the roads early in the mornings,” Brimmer said. “They will contact me to let me know their thoughts on the road conditions. In addition, I will be in contact with other local superintendents to determine what their thoughts are about whether or not to have school.
“Typically the process will begin betweeen 4:30 and 5:00 a.m. and we hope to have a decision and an announcement made around 5:30 a.m. Sometimes that time frame isn’t realistic, however. For example, the schools did not lose power until after 6 a.m. the one day, so we had to cancel later than we normally would have. If conditions are particularly bad the night before and we know that the road commission will not be out until the next morning, we will cancel the night before.” Brimmer said the district is working on getting its own licensing for a daycare.
“We had an agreement with an outside agency to run a daycare earlier in the year and they ended up pulling out,” he said. “We feel that daycare is a service that our community needs so we are pursuing getting the license in the district’s name. Even though the outside agency had all of the inspections done earlier in the year to open up, the state is making us get the inspections done all over again so the process is taking longer than we had anticipated.”
Brimmer said the district has been meeting with Wolgast to lay out the plans for the bond work that will begin this summer.
“Our enrollment has continued to increase so we have added another elementary teacher in an effort to keep class sizes low,” Brimmer said. “By keeping class sizes lower, we are hopeful that we can address some of the learning loss that occured as a result of Covid.”