Last year, Fort Worth Country Day students got a huge surprise… thick snow and slippery ice. However, the campus was not happy with the surprise of inclement weather. The streets, sidewalks, fields, and patches of grass were covered in thick layers of ice and snow. The school was declared unsafe for attendance due to these conditions for a total of three days. FWCD staff spent hours every one of these days to attempt to clear the snow and ice from the campus but more and more kept coming. Sports practices and games, tests and quizzes, other assignments and meetings were all either cancelled straight-out or postponed to a later date. This created chaos for the overwhelmed master calendar and with no backup in place, the only alternative was to push everything back to a later date and attempt to reschedule all of these events.

FWCD’s block schedule depends on all classes having the same number of days, and since not all classes meet the same day, the classes that are cancelled due to weather lose one of their sessions for the year. Therefore, in order to keep the schedule from collapsing, the block system needs extra support.

Peggy Wakeland, Upper School Assistant Division Head, and Bill Arnold ’86, Upper School Division Head, were not going to let the weather affect campus life again this year. They made changes to the calendar to prepare for any weather blown this way. Four snow days have been added into the calendar just in case the campus has to close.

“We hope to preserve the integrity of the schedule rotation and test calendar,” Wakeland said.

The last two days of the third and fourth quarter have been chosen as the snow days so that if any other school day during the year is cancelled, the block schedule can slide to the next day. For example, if school is cancelled on a Monday and is back in session on Tuesday, Monday’s schedule will shift to Tuesday and Tuesday’s schedule will become Wednesday’s schedule and so on. If one snow day is used, there will be an A-G day for one of the unused snow days. If two snow days are used, then there will be no adjusted schedule days. No tests or projects can be scheduled on these four days but students are still required to attend school, because these days will be used for an extra rotation if they are not needed.

Fort Worth Country Day is prepared to face any challenge weather brings this year and plan to keep the schedule organized under pressure.