PV virtual days set for next week

After much speculation and months of planning, the virtual days are finally ready to be unveiled. This year, they will take place on Tuesday, Feb. 2 and Wednesday, Feb. 3.

The virtual days were initially created in case of bad weather, but this year they will be used for students to stay home instead of physically having to be in school to give students a break at the halfway point of the school year.

“However, while the students are resting in their beds and sweatpants, teachers still must come to the school in order to abide by state law,” said Dr. Barry Bachenheimer, the Director of Curriculum. “Students are also welcome to come to school if for some reason they can’t stay home.”

Due to the numerous snowstorms in 2014, the district first tried a virtual day to explore another way to allow students to work rather than have extra days added onto the end of the year. The virtual day was only finalized about 36 hours before the school day was supposed to start after the school board and Bachenheimer found out about an approaching snowstorm.

“They had talked about attempting it before but never got around to it [until the storm],” Bachenheimer said.

That year, the school board asked the state and got permission to go through with the virtual day. However, the state decided not to count it as an official day of school. According to state policy, in order for virtual days to count, the school must be physically open.

“We were asking ourselves, is there a way to keep school going if the school is physically closed?” Bachenheimer said. In order to address the school policy, teachers are required to be at school for the upcoming virtual days.

Due to the fact that the state law requires that school be in session for a minimum of four hours per day, each virtual day will run on a half day block schedule.

Teachers will have a limited amount of work they can assign to their students via Canvas and should take roughly the same amount of time as a regular class period, in addition to independent time given from noon to 2:51 p.m. to finish the given assignments.

Since Canvas is used in every class, it will be much easier for students to log in and for attendance to be taken. If students neglect to sign into virtual class it will count as a cut.

Bachenheimer said that the goal is to have students walk away saying, “That was really cool, that was fun, that was innovative,” and not “Oh my God I never want to do this again!”