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Perrin stretches school day

Fri, 03/02/2018 - 4:48 pm

PERRIN – Students here will be going to school an additional 13 minutes per day starting Monday.

During Tuesday night’s regular school board meeting, Superintendent Cliff Gilmore explained the reasons why. Perrin had a surplus of 720 educational minutes during the 2017-18 school year. Because the school was closed unexpectedly for one day to clean and disinfect due to the flu and two days lost to weather last week, the district had a choice.

“We could either take away the two scheduled weather days in May, which parents, teachers, and students probably wouldn’t want us to do because they would cut into the long weekends, or we could extend the days we have by a short time,” Gilmore said.

The district has to make up 630 minutes among its last 50 days, so the school day, which now goes from 8 a.m. to 3:30 p.m., will now run from 7:55 a.m. to 3:38 p.m. beginning Monday.  Gilmore believes the impact will be minimal.

“Our teachers are already here at 7:45 a.m. and we will simply add eight minutes to our last period of the day,” Gilmore said.

In a related item, attendance has gone back up to normal since the deep cleaning and disinfecting earlier this month. The decision to deep clean was made after attendance had dropped to 78.5 percent at the elementary school. 

Attendance is back up in the 95 percent range at both campuses for the month, Gilmore said.

In other news, board members switched the district auditor from Snow Garrett Williams to Cameron Gulley. Cameron Gulley, based out of Eastland, had submitted a bid for $15,000 a year for the next two years with an increase of $15,500 in the third year. 

Snow Garrett Williams had bid $22,000 a year. Gilmore said that he had no problem with either company.

“We go over the budget weekly, to see if there are areas we could save money without it affecting the kids and SGW has done a fantastic job,” Gilmore said. “It would amount to about $22,000 over the life of the three year contract.”