Snow Days a concern for school officials

Granville and indeed the whole East Coast have been experiencing an old fashioned winter with lots of snow and cold temperatures, so it was no surprise snow days were a topic of conversation at Monday night’s meeting of the Granville Board of Education.

Superintendent Mark Bessen reminded board members the school has a single snow day left at meeting time, so he was focused on making sure that last one counts.

“I’ll be watching the forecast closely. We don’t want to be sitting at home saying, ‘Hey, where’s the snow?’” Bessen said.

Districts in the southern portions of the state have already had to cut into their April break vacation days, the next option left to school officials when snow days run out.

Bessen said he and business manager Cathy Somich were keeping a close eye on goings on in Albany as discussion of a tax cap continued to gain momentum. Both said a combination of state aid cuts and a tax cap limiting their ability to raise funds locally to make up for those cuts could mean extremely lean budgets going forward. A 2 percent tax cap has been proposed and would prevent the district from raising local taxes any more than 2 percent per year; the school district did not raise taxes in the 2009-2010 and 2010-2011 budgets.  

Weather was also on the minds of Principals Scott Bojanich, Diane Dumas and Kristie Gijanto. All mentioned report cards were expected to go out at the end of the week, unless affected by the forecast snowfall.

Bojanich said all of the trophies have been located and are in the process of being cleaned; the plan is to populate the new trophy case near the cafeteria and main office as well as rearrange some of the hardware in the trophy case outside of the high school gymnasium.

More than 25 faculty members attended the meeting and representatives Leanne Grandjean and Tim Patrick presented the Board of Education with a brief overview of group work they were doing with learning strategies to help students in the school district.