Arkansas education officials on Wednesday voted to allow half the state’s public-school districts to add time to each school day for the rest of the year to make up for January’s snow days.
According to Arkansas Advocate, the shift from a traditional days-based calendar to an alternate hourly calendar comes as January’s severe winter weather highlighted the LEARNS Act’s practical elimination of alternative methods of instruction (AMI) days, which districts used in recent years to offer virtual instruction when schools were closed for weather, disease outbreaks or utility outages.
While the LEARNS Act did not repeal the law that created AMI days, it does require at least 178 days or 1,078 hours of “on-site, in-person instruction” to receive state funding that supports increasing the state’s minimum teacher salary from $36,000 to $50,000.
More details on the story can be found on the Arkansas Advocate Website.
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