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Each year, the Ossining School District has seven inclement weather days. This year, Hurricane Sandy took five away in early November. The New York State Education Department will allow two more snow days before district officials will need to cut into planned vacation days to make them up. If the need arises, the district will use March 25 to 27 as weather make-up days.
There's been no need to cancel school since Sandy, but interim Superintendent Ray Sanchez said the district is not out of the woods yet.
“I’m hopeful that the trend we’ve had recently of warmer weather stays because we know other districts have had to make up days and we feel fortunate that we haven’t,” Sanchez said. “I’m certainly not looking for snow to arrive anytime soon but we do have options if it does.”
One of those options, Sanchez said, is to use delayed openings or early closings, which do not count as full snow days and the hours lost won’t need to be made up with additional school days.
“Early and late dismissals are not deducted from the time we have on our inclement weather days,” Sanchez said. “It’s something we’ve used a few times this year without any problems so it’s been good.”
Parent Lisa Rudley said she’s not concerned that the district has had to use delayed openings and early closings this year and will rely on daycare if snow days occur.
“The beauty of a daycare center is that you can drop your children off and head out to work because the school buses will pick them up from there,” Rudley said. “If you’re a parent and going off to work, you’re probably dropping your children off at the daycare anyway so that helps a lot on snow days.”
Rudley said the school district has adjusted well after Hurricane Sandy.
“I think they’ve done a really good job of making adjustments to the calendar and really made it a non-event,” Rudley said. “The delayed openings and early closings have helped and I think they’ve done well to make sure it’s not an issue.”
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