ELKINS — Randolph County Schools Superintendent Dr. Shawn Dilly said the county school system has officially used up all of its snow and non-traditional instruction days for this school year.

“We’ve already gone through our five snow days and our NTI (Non-Traditional Instruction) days and we are in the process of makeup days,” Dilly said during this week’s Randolph County Board of Education meeting. “We obviously have not brought these to the Board yet, because we may be facing more this week and the next week.”

Dilly provided the BOE with proposed makeup dates. One is proposed on April 6, with more proposed makeup dates on June 4, 5, 8 and 9.

“One of the downsides of having a fixed spring break is that it always adds to the end of the year, pretty much,” Dilly said. “So we are going to be looking at the middle of June probably, which has impacts on construction and summer programs – a lot of challenges in that regard.”

BOE President Rachel Burns told Dilly that it would be best if the days were made up before June.

“We need to do whatever we are allowed to do so that we get in the most days before June, because we lose the kids in June,” Burns said. “So whatever we can do, I know we are not taking away spring break, but whatever we can do to make those instructional days, because they will be worth a whole lot more in April or May versus June 9.”

Spring break for Randolph County students is scheduled to take place March 30 through April 3.

Dilly said he wanted to commend the county’s school bus drivers for transporting children to school safely on Tuesday.

“We knew it was going to be a little bit of a challenge,” Dilly said. “We did some preliminary snow route efforts and basically what occurred was that the transportation department and Mr. (Nick) Alfred made calls to bus drivers and asked what they felt wouldn’t be safe… I want to send gratitude to the drivers for taking great precautions and making sure our kids were safe traveling back and forth.”

Dilly said many people are not aware that, locally, the state Department of Highways is out of salt for the roads in many locations throughout Randolph County.

“Stuff’s not getting treated, which has led to a lot of additional days of closures,” Dilly said. “People forget that there’s a lot of components that go into school closure decisions, and one that impacts us most often is bus turnarounds on those secondary roads. They are not as easy as people think. It’s not their car turning around out there, it’s a very large bus.

“We recognized there were a few families impacted but when we did the calculations, that’s less than 1% of the kids that were impacted today (Tuesday). So if we can get 99% of our kids here safely, we are slowly going to work toward having that.”

Dilly said he has asked the Transportation Department to have a “very standard” plan in place for next year for snow routes.

“As we go into next year, hopefully some of these days we can try to capture back so we are not missing as many days as we have had in the past,” Dilly said. “Snow routes are something we are familiar with, but it just hasn’t been established here as a protocol. So we are going to try and work to develop that and finalize that.”

BOE member Sherri Collett recommended that the school maintenance departments be recognized for all the work they’ve been doing while snow and ice has been building up around the schools.

“Thank you for bringing that up, because they are incredibly important,” Dilly told Collett. “A lot of people don’t realize that a lot of times, our maintenance staff is jumping in and working on Sunday afternoons, early in the mornings, and late in the evenings. A lot of people don’t realize how much they’re doing.”

The next Randolph County Board of Education meeting will be Feb. 17 at 5:30 p.m.