BRUNSWICK

With a nor’easter forecast to strike the Northeast today, Midcoast school officials are keeping an eye on the snow days they’ve racked up.

Given the most recent weather forecast as of Tuesday evening, Superintendent Brad Smith said Maine School Administrative District 75 would likely be canceling school Thursday.

MSAD 75 was faced with a challenge this school year after using up all five allotted “snow days” on its calendar during the week of Halloween. The four member towns suffered major damage and power outages due to a high-wind tropical storm. The district has found a variety of ways to make up those days though, according to MSAD 75 Assistant Superintendent Dan Chuhta.

Since then, the district has only had three “real” snow days, putting the last day of school at June 20. If school is canceled Thursday, that bumps it to June 21.

Brunswick School Department has used all five of its snow days — two of them during the wind storm, said Superintendent Paul Perzanoski. The state requires school systems have 175 student days of school, and Brunswick has 176 days built into its calendar now. So, if school is canceled Thursday, the school board would be asked to revise the 2017-18 calendar to include one less student day.

If the district needs to declare any more snow days beyond that, they will be made up at the end of the school year, Perzanoski said.

He noted that storms have an impact on the budget, mainly in overtime and extra plowing costs.

Bigger than the financial impact, however, Perzanoski said, is the disruption to the education process. Stopping and starting during the school week, he said, can throw students and staff off as schools enter the state assessment season.

Exceeding alloted snow days is also a problem for other schools in the region.

“That would be the seventh day that we used, but we made up a day in January that was a teacher day that we had students came in on,” said RSU 1 Superintendent Patrick Manuel. “So (it would be) a net of six that we’ve used.”

No snow day has been announced at the time of this report, but it seems likely with more than a foot of snow expected in Bath on Thursday. If a snow day is called, that would set the district’s last day of school as Monday, June 18.

School cancellations began early this year, when a wind storm knocked out power in the district for three days, resulting in half of the cancellations so far.

The school administration had previously stated that Late Start Wednesdays could be canceled to make up for the missed days, but Manuel said that it’s still too early to determine whether or not to take that action. If the number of missed days stands at seven with the last day on a Monday, it’s likely that students would be asked to come in on a Late Start Wednesday so that the last day of school could be on a Friday.

“We’ll be communicating soon,” Manuel said, “but we don’t want to communicate too soon because if we have more snow days it just throws more of a monkey wrench into it.”

He said that a decision would likely be made before April.