Makeup days could save planned holidays for PAISD
Published 5:25 pm Tuesday, January 23, 2018
By Lorenzo Salinas
Port Arthur students will get the chance to keep most of their holidays if they’ll follow through with a couple of makeup days.
Port Arthur Independent School District announced Tuesday that all students and staff would be required to attend their respective schools Feb. 19 and March 3. The former is Presidents’ Day, the latter is a Saturday.
“We understand that these days may be an inconvenience to some, but this year is not like years past. Hurricane Harvey dealt our district a major blow and we missed 15 days of instruction. We will not get those 15 days back,” Superintendent Mark Porterie said in a public letter released Tuesday.
“We then dealt with missed days due to other acts of nature. We are having to make decisions that we don’t make during a normal school year.”
The announcement stressed the importance of the makeup days, stating that unless 90 percent of students show up for those days, then the district would either have to extend the school year or use one or more days from Spring Break.
Graduation date remains June 6 for seniors and the last class day is June 7. If students make up the scheduled days, then no additional days will be added.
The missed days from last week are the latest in a series of absences for a district hit hard by floods, ice, snow and water issues — all in the same school year. PAISD was delayed more than two weeks in starting the school year due to Harvey in late August and early September. Texas Education Agency granted it a waiver for those days missed.
Public schools in Texas used to be required to provide at least 180 days of instruction for students. That requirement has recently been changed to a certain number of minutes instead of days.
“The school year now requires 75,600 minutes of instruction time,” DeEtta Culbertson, information specialist for TEA, said. “That’s roughly equal to 180 days.”
Culbertson explained the change was made in order to provide a more flexible option for districts to make up missed time. In this way, they could simply add minutes to existing school days instead of having to add whole new days to the schedule.
Port Arthur schools resumed class Monday.
