Calamity Days Unlikely To Lengthen Mentor School Year

Mentor Schools have had to miss school days this year for lake effect snow and Hurricane Sandy hangovers, but it's unlikely that they will have to lengthen their school year to make up for an excess of calamity days as they did in 2011.

Schools are alotted five calamity days per year. This means -- under normal circumstances -- if a building misses more than five days, they would have to make up the balance some time before the end of the school year.

A few schools in Mentor are close to that precipice. Fairfax Elementary has missed a total of four days; Shore and Orchard Hollow have missed three; the rest have missed two.

However, all the Mentor Public Schools have an additional 3-day buffer before they need to make up calamity days. This is because the district participates in the Blizzard Bag program.

The Blizzard Bag program allows the schools to post prepared assignments online during a calamity day.

If 80 percent of students complete their assignments, then the calamity day will not count against the district's total.

That means even Fairfax would need to have more than four additional calamity days (and more than eight total) before its school year is extended, which -- considering how much snow Mentor has gotten this week -- is a good thing.