Calamity Days Running Low for Some Districts

Despite the lack of winter weather, some schools in our area are running low on calamity days.

School Districts are allotted a total of five calamity days to use throughout the school year in the event of inclement weather or other emergency.
Zanesvilel City School’s Student Services Director, Kevin Appleman, said his district was affected early this year by the release of Terry Thompson’ exotic animals in October, but said if calamity days run low for the district, he’ll talk to the state.

"It’s too early to even talk about that, because if we don’t even use all of our calamity days it doesn’t really matter, but if we would go over, at the time they advised me to take a letter of appeal, but we’ll just wait until we get past these days," said Appleman.

We contacted many of the local school districts in our area for their calamity day totals so far this year.
Crooksville, Maysville, Nothern & Southern Local Schools have used three of their five days.
Zanesville City, West Muskingum, Ridgewood and River View Local Schools have used two of those days.

Tri-Valley, Cambridge, Franklin, and East Muskingum Local Schools have used one, and Coshocton City Schools haven’t used any of their calamity days yet.

We spoke with Maysville Local Schools Superintendent, Monte Bainter, and Franklin Local Schools Superintendent, Sharon McDermott this afternoon, by phone.
Both say their decision to cancel school takes a lot of preparation and communication with officials in and out of the district.
Something Appleman said is all based on safety; not the numbers.

"We always do it for safety. we want to make sure that nobody gets hurt whatsoever from our staff clear down to our drivers, our students, our parents; anyone. We just don’t want anyone to get hurt, so we act on the part of safety, " added Appleman.

The districts we spoke to added that they have days built into the year, during spring break holidays to use if they do go over their five day limit.