UPDATE: After this story was originally posted, Cape Girardeau Public Schools canceled classes for Thursday.
Everybody is tired of winter, including school administrators. After a new ice storm hit Southeast Missouri on Tuesday, schools are doing their best to adjust to the bad weather.
Neil Glass, assistant superintendent for Cape Girardeau Public Schools, said the schools already had to take 5 days off because of the weather conditions. This consequently impacts kids’ education because missed days imply less material to be covered in time. Glass gave the example of the MAP (Measures of Academic Progress) and EOC (End-Of-Course) tests which have set days and cannot be postponed due to an altered schedule. Teachers have fewer days to prepare their students and some material does not get to be covered.
The Cape Girardeau Public Schools academic calendar is available on their website and details the make-up days for the missed days due to the ice storm.
“We have days that are identified in our school calendar, which is adopted every year and some of those days do come off on spring break, and others do come off at the end of the school year, which would start our summer vacation,” Glass said.
Administrators make last minute decisions about closing school for the day, and the weather dictates their decision. Indeed, they need to look at the forecast and the roads and parking lots before making their call.
“We wait until we know that it’s upon us, and when it is, we know pretty much what the expectation is, and then we make our decisions from there. But we try not to plan. We always look at the forecast but we don’t plan anything in advance in hope that some kind of storm is ahead of us,” Glass explained.
Will there be school tomorrow? Glass and the superintendent will take a drive later on today to check the roads and parking lot conditions and to take a look at tomorrow’s forecast to see what can be expected.