The Extended School Day: Why and How it is Being Implemented

A photo from Brown’s Chapel Road and Bamboo road on a snowy morning. Weather often results in remote school days. The extended school day will hopefully reduce the amount of remote days and will allow for students to take advantage and play in the beautiful snow. Photo Creds: The Watauga Democrat

Roz Rabinowitz, Junior Editor of The Powderhorn

Thirteen Days. Thirteen Days were spent at home with students stuck behind computer screens, trying to engage with lagging internet, and distracting family members. This is the reality of school in the winter months. 

In the High Country, it’s common to have at least a week off from school every year due to winter weather, with this past year continuing the tradition. This trend may seem great considering the old-time snow days, but modern technology has led to the introduction of remote learning. Remote learning is conducted through Google Meets and is notoriously disliked by students, teachers, and parents alike. But only so many days can be missed before Watauga County misses their state calendar requirement. 

This requirement states that the school must be in session for 185 days out of the year. While this may seem impossible to reach with so much snow, delays, remote school, and half days count as full days according to this calendar law. This is often why the County Office relies on remote days to continue students' education and ensure their safety during winter weather. 

While in the past couple of years, Watauga County has relied on remote days to meet the calendar law, this past year, only one remote day was left before days would have had to be taken from summer, spring break, or the weekend. This predicament has led the County Office to form a committee focused on finding a solution that is both practical for students and teachers and meets the Calendar law. 

“This particular group met six times during the spring, summer, and fall of 25. So they had representation from parents, staff, admin, and other ad hoc participants. They reviewed calendar law to determine flexibility and options,” explained Dr. Leslie Alexander, Superintendent of Watauga County Schools. “In looking at that, we realized that we're not capturing as many instructional minutes because of the length of our day.”

The calendar law states that schools can count their instructional time by days or hours. Surrounding counties such as Ashe and Avery count by hours and also have about 10-20 more instructional minutes than Watauga County does. These counties tend to have fewer remote days or no remote learning in general. 

“We're counting the minutes during the school year because even though I think we do remote really well, we still believe face-to-face is better. So we're getting more quality minutes as opposed to those remote minutes,” said Alexander.

 The various data from surveys, research, and the comparison between other counties has led to the joint decision of abiding by the calendar law through counting hours next year, and the decision to add more instructional minutes to the school day.  This will add 10 minutes to the high school schedule and 25 minutes to the middle and elementary schools' schedules. 

“When we look at our regional comparisons, you can see that at our high school, we're not that far off.  Look at our middle school and elementary school, a 45-minute difference,” said Alexander. “So really, for calendar law, we count the high school time, but we needed to get more minutes at K-8 because that was just such a discrepancy.”

Middle school and elementary students consistently have shorter attention spans and are still learning the proper way to behave and attend school. This longer school day could have adverse effects on students' ability to focus, meaning more support will need to be given to these teachers while they are adjusting to this extended school day. 

“It's always going to be an adjustment, but the truth is, we've been going less than other people. K-8 teachers have said they don't have enough time. I feel like the professional development we provide teachers will enable them to know how to use that time,” said Alexander. “We've always got to be thoughtful with young learners.”

Watauga County has also had to adapt transportation due to the unique situation of our schools sharing buses between the K-8 schools and the high school. This is why the majority of the time added to the day has been added to the beginning of the day, because K-8 schools need to end at a time that the buses are accessible to the high school students. 

“Most people who didn't like adding the minutes didn't like it because we have to start earlier. The reason we have to start earlier at high school is because we can't take that day much longer for a lot of reasons,” said Alexander. “People have after-school jobs, there are after-school clubs, and athletics. We play other counties, so that time is sort of set, and we have over 700 high school students who play a sport. Some of them play multiple sports. If we added time to the end, then that would be a lot of kids who are athletes missing fourth period, and that's an equity issue for them. So we can't go too late.”

Every new change comes with challenges and adjustments, but over time, this will increase the instructional time, quality of learning, and hopefully reduce the number of remote days for the county.

“We've developed this FAQ,” said Alexander. “There were four themes that kind of kept coming up, but there were obviously a couple of parents that had questions that not a ton of parents asked for. But I wanted to just develop a FAQ and talk through things like, why can't we just go later, and just kind of go into more detail, to explain, because there are a lot of things to consider.”

Parents and students who are looking for more information regarding the extended school day can check the county website. Information will be added as schools finalize their new schedules.