The Pennsylvania Department of Education has granted the use of flexible instruction days (FIDs) during the 2021-2022 school year. 

“FIDs are days that the state Department of Education, allows us to deliver instruction in a virtual mode, but still count it as a regular day,” Principal Andrew Neely said.

FID days can be used in case of inclement weather to cut down on the number of school make-up days needed.

“If we get snow days throughout the year, we can call a FID day,” Neely said.

FID days must be called in advance to avoid confusion.

“Legally, we have to call the FID day at noon the day prior. For example, if we’re predicting a lot of snow on a Thursday, then Wednesday by noon, we’d have to tell everyone we’re doing a FID day, so then students would know they’d definitely have to bring their Chromebooks home,” Neely said.

Students will still have to use a snow make-up day for Sept. 1, due to the rain cancellation.

“Unfortunately, that event we had last week [Sept. 1] with the rain, we weren’t quite ready to do a FID day yet because we still had a lot of students that had yet to get a Chromebook. That would’ve been a prime example of how we could’ve used one,” Neely said.

The Department of Education authorized use of five FID days for the year.

“The state authorized us to have up to five of those this school year. Five snow days is probably, on average, about how many we have,” Neely said.

FID days might be used in case of COVID-19 numbers increasing.

“It’s possible, we had done some things like that last year actually, where we would close down for a day or two, to sort of reset. I don’t know that we’ll need to, hopefully not,” Neely said.

However, it is unlikely that FID days would be used in such a manner.

“Our threshold is a lot higher than it was last year when it comes to how many active cases and where you have to shut the school down. We’re nowhere near that right now, so knock on wood we’ll continue to not reach that number,” Neely said.

Some alternative uses of FID days are still being explored.

“Another area that we’re looking to use FID days possibly is during state testing. If you remember back to last year we shut down, we basically had a FID day and only students that needed to test were required to come into school,” Neely said.

Neely hopes that FID days will help keep the end of the school year intact.

“So it makes it a little easier to predict the actual end of the school year, which is nice for families and for administrators and teachers as well because there’s a lot of stuff we have to do over the summer to get ready, and to close up the year and get ready for the next. So I will tell you that this summer was very compacted, because we had a late end and an early start. So hopefully the FID days help to preserve the end day of the school year a little better,” Neely said.