Safety First

The safety of your child is very important to us. If road conditions are too dangerous for our buses to travel with safety then our schools will either open late or be closed for the day.

Sources of School Closure Information

You can tune in to the following TV stations for the latest information when there is bad weather:

• WKRN Channel 2
• WSMV Channel 4
• WTVF Channel 5
• WZTV Channel 17

These local news services do such a good job of getting this kind of information out to the public we will not attempt to post our weather related school closure information to our web site.

Early Dismissal

If schools dismiss early they will be dismissed based on their normal dismissal times. This is because our bus routes fit somewhat like a jigsaw puzzle. We cannot dismiss all schools at a specific time (say 1:00) as some news agencies report. An accurate report would say something like "Robertson County is closing 2 hours early." (So if your child's school normally dismisses at 3:30 and we are closing 2 hours early, they will be going home at 1:30.)

Making Up Days Missed

We are required by the State of Tennessee to operate our schools for 180 days each school year. According to these rules our school days must be 6.5 hours long. This means each student is supposed to receive 1170 hours of instruction each year.

These rules also allow us to set a longer school day and stockpile this time in the event of school closure. Robertson County Schools takes advantage of these rules by operating with a 7 hour school day. This works out to 1260 hours of instruction or an additional 13 days of school. We use two of these days for staff development days so 11 days are available for making up weather related closures.

If our schools are closed due to inclement weather (or some other reason) we can count the first 11 days of school missed against this stockpiled time and not change our school calendar in any way. If we are closed for 12 or more days we will have to change our calendar to make up for any days we missed past the 11 day.

This policy comes with a risk (kind of like an insurance policy). Should we miss less than 11 days of school we still have to maintain our school calendar as it is. We are not allowed to shorten the calendar just because we did not use the stockpiled time.