Marshall County Schools Sets Tentative 2021-22 Schedule | News, Sports, Jobs

MOUNDSVILLE — Marshall County school administrators are operating under a tentative opening date of August 24 for the 2021-2022 school year, ending May 24.

The Marshall County School Board is holding two public hearings on the calendar. The first of which was Tuesday and the second is on April 27. The board is expected to vote on approval of the calendar after that meeting.

The faculty’s calendar year begins and ends a week beyond the student’s year, on Aug. 17 and June 1. Kindergarten and pre-school instruction also begins at a later date.

Superintendent Shelby Haines met with representatives from the Marshall County Education Association, the faculty senate from each of the county’s schools, and the Service Personnel Committee to go over concerns and to seek input on the calendar.

“Some of the major changes to the calendar that we were proposing, that everyone seemed positive about, are that we added an extra professional development day at the beginning,” Haines said. “We usually just have two, and then a teacher preparation day. Last year, because of COVID, we moved a whole bunch of training days to the front of the calendar.

“We added one extra training day to the front, and we’ve gotten a lot of feedback from teachers, they really seem to like that,” she added. “Another thing we got a lot of feedback on is that people wanted the day before Thanksgiving off, for travel, so we added that.”

Similarly to Ohio County, Marshall County will also be implementing five non-traditional instructional days on top of the five snow days. If the district needs to use more than five snow days, five days may be conducted using remote learning, rather than needing to make up that time outside of the planned calendar year. If those days go unused, Haines said, they’ll just be regular, in-school instruction days.

“We’ll have five real snow days, and then five non-traditional instructional days before we then have to start taking … days back,” she said. “… Those five non-traditional instruction days, we could call them ‘snow days,’ on a snow day, or we’ll just have real school, instead of remote learning.”

If more than 10 days off are needed due to inclement weather or similar reasons, they will be made up first around Easter, and then at the end of the school year.

Haines said the district was looking forward to returning to more unprecedented times, following the tumultuous 2020 and 2021 school years.

“We’re looking forward to planning a school year where we can return our main focus to curriculum and instruction,” she added. “Not that we haven’t been paying attention to curriculum, but we’ve had so many COVID protocols and restrictions that were looming over us, we’re just happy to get back to what our focus should be: teaching and learning.”