1-20-25 Superintendent Calendar Update
20 January 2025
Greenback Families,
This letter is to update our emergency days (snow days) status and give a calendar update.
The state has two methods for calculating the required student contact time: hours or days. We
go by hours and 1,116 hours is the minimum requirement for schools. I’ll convert that to days to
simplify our discussion. Coming into the year, we had a buffer of 4.72 days to use as emergency
days before having to add days to the calendar. We have used 2 snow days, so we have 2.72
days remaining.
The state also allows us to specify “conversion” days for those weekdays during the year that
are vacation days (it cannot be a professional day). By naming those days in advance, we can
convert those days to school days and we receive 3 more “forgiveness” days. After January 20 th
(it was listed as a conversion day, but we don’t need it yet), our only conversion day left is on
April 18, which is Good Friday. We did not specify any of the 5 days during Spring Break in
order to avoid putting one school day in the middle of the break. If we would need to use more
than 3 snow days (or other days we may have to close school, water main break, etc), then we
would need to convert April 18 th to a school day. We would certainly be flexible with parents on
that day. I wanted to give a heads up and some explanation of the state policy.
As a side note, if we delay by 2 hours or less on a school day for hazardous driving conditions,
we do not have count that as emergency time taken, so it does not factor into the calculation
discussed above.
We have a calendar update. PHS will host Central Kansas League Forensics this year on April
21 st . It is an all-day event and requires the building to be vacated to run the activity. We will
have no school for PHS students on April 21 st but SW, PAC, and LMS will have a regular school
day for students. Our PHS staff will help manage and judge the various events—Forensics is a
large undertaking and PHS has a tradition of success.
Sincerely,
Tony Helfrich