BRUNSWICK

With snow piled high amidst a seemingly never-ending winter, local school districts are taking stock as to how cancellations are affecting the school year.

Brunswick has canceled school four times this academic year.

In a letter to the Brunswick community, Superintendent Paul Perzanoski stated that Brunswick has 176 student days built into its calendar. That includes five built-in snow days. The state requires 175 student days.

Perzanoski wrote that, should additional cancellations occur, he would consider either requesting a waiver from the Maine Department of Education, or adding additional school days to the end of the calendar year.

The Brunswick district has also called for two-hour delays three times due to the weather. Those delays do not count against the school year, however.

Speaking on Wednesday to the school board, Brunswick’s Assis- tant Superintendent Gregory

Bartlett outlined the process he follows before deciding whether to call off school in the district. That process starts with monitoring early weather reports at 4:30 a.m. and consulting with Precision Weather, the school district’s meteorologist.

The decision is also made in consultation with other districts, including School Administrative District 75. After a decision is reached, local principals, including those at Region 10 Technical High School and St. John’s Catholic School are informed, as well as news outlets.

“The bottom line is, in the end, you have to make a judgment call. That can be a simple, obvious call. Then there are other times when you’re on the edge and it’s an excruciatingly difficult call,” Bartlett said. “When that happens, I’m pretty much a nervous wreck throughout the school day.”

Bartlett noted that parents have the right to keep their children home for all or part of the day if school is being held but the parent feels it’s still unsafe. Brunswick schools do not conduct early dismissals due to inclement weather, Bartlett said, because in the past when they have done so, students were left stranded at the bus garage and in schools when their parents were unable to pick them up.

Regional School Unit 5, which incorporates the towns of Freeport, Pownal and Durham, has used three snow days so far, according to RSU 5 Board Chairman Nelson Larkins, all within recent weeks.

Snow days are not built into the RSU 5’s school year. As a result, the final day of school has been bumped back to June 19, as of Wednesday.

“If we miss a day, we tag it onto the end of the year,” Larkins said.

Regional School Unit 1, which includes the communities of Arrowsic, Bath, Phippsburg, West Bath and Woolwich, has used four snow days this school year, according to Patrick Manuel, the RSU 1 superintendent.

With all the assessments that take place during this time of year, Manuel said the frequent snow days have been frustrating, especially since snow maintenance has also caused additional work. Even without the four cancellations, he noted the school days between December and February are already short because of Christmas vacation and the upcoming winter break.

Manuel recalled having three to four snow days last year, but said this winter appears worse because the cancellations have fallen closer to each other.

“We’ve never used as many snow days in a short amount of time,” he added.

There are many factors that go into deciding whether to cancel school or not and “nothing compares to the single factor of safety of our students and staff,” said SAD 75 Superintendent Brad Smith during a school board meeting Thursday night. It is Maine and it snows in Maine, so the presence or forecast of snow doesn’t necessarily mean school has to be shut down, he said. Not only are there conditions in the morning to consider but he must look at whether buses can roll and get kids safely back home after school.

Smith begins watching weather forecasts the night before and again in the morning. That morning, Transportation Director Adam Mayo drives from Bowdoin to his office and calls Smith at 4:30 a.m. Bus drivers leave their homes at 5:30 a.m. which leaves an hour window for Smith to make the call about school cancellations or delays. An automated phone system is used to alert nearly 2,600 households of canceled school or delays within the district which serves Bowdoin, Bowdoinham, Harpswell and Topsham. Weather and road conditions can vary across those four towns.

“I make that decision listening to a variety of sources and coordinating at 5 o’clock in the morning with the superintendent of RSU 5 and Brunswick because we jointly send students” to Region 10 Technical High School, Smith said. “We’ve had along history of communicating with one another before making those decisions.

“We’ve had four canceled school days so far this year and two delayed starts,” Smith said. The calendar has five days built into reserve for snow makeup days. The calendar has been updated on the district website to now reflect the days that have been canceled using snowflakes. School was originally scheduled to end June 15, but as it stands now the last official school day would be June 19. One more day of canceled school means SAD 75 will use the fifth makeup day taking the end of school to Monday, June 22.

Asked already by parents “What if we go beyond five,” Smith said, “We don’t have an answer for that because we build up to five makeup days and we use those five. If we have get a sixth day, we have a possibly of a day in April that is a professional development day” which could perhaps be used as a makeup day. He noted parents and staff have to have adequate time to make plans for a makeup day.