Alan Mauldin
MOULTRIE — In baseball, they have rainouts. Those games are made up later. And in South Georgia schools, rainouts also occur. And yes, they get made up later.
So when the roads are washed away due to heavy rains and the school buses can’t run, South Georgia has the equivalent of “snow days.” But, it’s not really a holiday for the kids.
Colquitt County School Board on Monday added two school days to the end of the school day to make up for three days of instruction lost due to weather.
The school system canceled classes on April 1, 2 and 3 due to heavy rains that closed numerous roadways and on the advice of emergency personnel.
The system was not required to add the days to the school calendar, but the additional days were recommended by Schools Superintendent Leonard McCoy.
“The board has the option to include up to four days on an emergency that are not made up,” McCoy said during a telephone interview Tuesday. “(But) children need to have the opportunity to be in school.”
The action approved by the board will make May 29 the final day of school for the 2008-2009 school year. Originally the last day of school was scheduled for May 27.
The last day for teachers will be June 3, the last of three teacher workdays.
The added days will not cause the system to incur any additional costs, McCoy said.
“It will offset the cost of the three days that we missed,” he said.
McCoy said the decision to cancel classes was a difficult one at the time, with senior testing scheduled during the days missed, but definitely the right thing to do under the circumstances.
“We didn’t have a choice,” he said. “You can’t imagine how much I didn’t want to cancel. I said I’m not going to put children on roads with the circumstances being as bad as (Roads and Bridges Director) Charles Weathers said.”
On Monday the school board also approved new payment rates for long-term substitute teachers.
Under the new pay schedule, retired teachers who work ten or more consecutive days for the same teacher will receive $260 per day, while substitutes who are not retired teachers under the same circumstances will receive $150 per day.
The change will save the system an estimated $30,000 per year.
In other business the board also received March dropout figures which showed only four dropouts -- one each in grades nine through 12 -- for the month.
Through the first eight months of the school year, 44 dropouts have been recorded, with two months left in the school year. For the 2007-2008 dropouts totaled 86 for the entire school year for all high school students, down from 188 for the 2005-2006 school year.
McCoy said there is no one factor that can account for the improvement.
It was “an absolute multitude of things beginning with major school improvements that paid dividends in learning,” he said.
For the 2007-2008 school year the completion rate -- the percentage of students who began as ninth-graders four years earlier and finished all graduation requirements -- was 72 percent, which also represents a significant improvement.
