School board extends school year to make up for missed storm days

ALBANY — While the appointment of Ken Dyer as the Dougherty County School System’s next superintendent garnered most of the headlines late Monday, there were several other noteworthy items that were addressed by the Dougherty County School Board.

After the storms of Jan. 2 and 22 shut down the district’s 23 schools, resulting in the loss of 12 instructional days, the board approved a revised calendar that will extend the school year until May 26 and make up for six of those lost days. In addition, school officials have also taken two pre-planned teacher conference half-days and made them full school days.

Spring break, scheduled for March 27 through April 3, will not be impacted.

Overall, the revised calendar will give the school system six extra instructional days to cover lost ground and prepare students for state testing.

DCSS spokesman J.D. Sumner said state testing will be pushed back as far as possible to give students as much time as allowed to prepare.

The state Department of Education agreed to push testing back to the week of April 24-28 for high school seniors and middle and elementary students for end-of-grade testing.

Sumner said the GaDOE also agreed to waive attendance requirements for CCRPI calculations.

High School graduation for the DCSS’s four high schools has been reset for May 20.

During the board’s pre-briefing, Commodore Conyers College and Career Academy (4C) CEO Chris Hatcher gave an update on the Academy’s progress in renovating Southside Middle School.

“Phase I of the renovations will be completed in April, and we should have our first cohort of approximately 450 students set to go in August,” Hatcher said. “We hope to increase that number to 900 students by the second year of operation.”

Students will attend 4C half-days and will remain tethered to their zone schools. Hatcher added the college and career academy is in the midst of marketing itself to parents and school systems in the region.

“Our biggest selling point is students have the opportunity to earn an associate’s degree before graduating high school at no costs to them,” he said.

At the moment the 4c has seven area high schools in the fold: the DCSS’ Albany, Dougherty, Monroe and Westover high schools; and Baker, Calhoun and Terrell county high schools. Students will earn post-graduate hours at Albany Technical College and Albany State University.

Also in the pre-briefing, Albany attorney Jim Finkelstein made a pitch to restart a tutoring/mentoring program for DCSS first-graders. The original pilot program, along with the DCSS Partners in Excellence program, paired gifted high school students with at-risk elementary students to tutor them one-on-one in reading. The program was later discontinued.

The rejuvenated program will pay the tutors $8 an hour and will be funded entirely by voluntary contributions.

“So far we have three Westover High School students and two Albany State interns working in my office who have tutored one day at Sherwood Acres Elementary School, working with seven students during extended day,” Finkelstein said. “I am asking the members of the board to pass a resolution directing the superintendent and (DCSS Finance Director) Ken Dyer to set up an account and a payment system so the voluntary contributions to pay the tutors can be channeled through the school system directly.”