With winter quickly approaching, Watauga County Schools would like to remind families how the district makes and communicates decisions about the operation of school during inclement weather.

This year, thanks to additional equipment and student laptops purchased in response to the COVID-19 pandemic, the district plans to utilize remote learning on certain school days that would have otherwise been cancelled and later made up due to inclement weather.

Superintendent Scott Elliott said the districts’ period of remote learning in the fall had prepared WCS with the equipment and experience it needed to operate school remotely on snow days this winter.

“Our experience with remote learning has given us the opportunity for the first time to hold school remotely on days that winter weather would have ordinarily forced us to close our doors,” Elliott said. “While remote learning can’t fully replace what our students experience in our classrooms in person, it will give us much needed flexibility to mitigate the impact missing 15 to 20 days a year because of inclement weather can have on instruction.”

Elliott said that using remote learning to replace snow days this year would eliminate the need for Saturday school, protect Christmas and Spring break and help ensure that the school year would not need to be extended into late June to make-up for snow days. However, remote days will not completely eliminate the need to make up all the days Watauga Schools typically miss each year.

This year, the North Carolina General Assembly mandated that school districts build five remote learning days into their calendars. Watauga County Schools used the first of those required days to close school buildings for students on Election Day. Elliott said the remaining four would be used to cover snow days — especially before Christmas break so that exams could be given at the high school before students went home for the holidays.

“If we find that these remote learning days are successful, we have the option to use more if we need to,” Elliott said. “We’ve had a very productive experience with remote learning in the past, and if we see those high levels of participation and good use of time continue going forward, it’s my hope we will be able to use remote learning even further to limit the number of days missed.”
However, Elliott warned that if the days are not used effectively, then remote learning on snow days will be limited moving forward.

While WCS has been able to provide take home devices to many students over the course of this year — along with more than 200 wifi hotspots provided to homes with no landline internet access — Elliott said there were still pockets the community for whom high speed internet access was simply not available.

“Remote learning this year has made it more clear than ever that a number of families across our county face significant challenges accessing high speed internet,” Elliott said. “Teachers will work with students who won’t be able to access the internet at home to prepare materials to supplement their remote learning days. It’s not necessarily an ideal solution, but until high speed internet infrastructure is extended into rural communities across Watauga, our staff will do everything possible to ensure our students have equal access to the materials they need to learn.”

Elliott said that, while remote learning days provided much needed flexibility in long and often severe winters, it was still his priority to get students into school buildings in person when it is safe to do so. The district will still continue with it’s long implemented standards for early morning road checks and close contact with the National Weather Service in Blacksburg, Va. on days with inclement weather.

When bad weather begins overnight, the process for making decisions about the operation of school kicks off at 3 a.m. when Elliott and Transportation Director Jeff Lyons begin the process of gathering information about road conditions and the most current weather forecast.

By 3:30 a.m., a road check team consisting of Elliott, Lyons, and other staff members begins driving assigned routes to check road conditions throughout Watauga County. Lyons and Elliott both routinely participate in a morning live conference call with National Weather Service meteorologists in Blacksburg, VA at 4:30 a.m.

In an average winter, crews are on the road approximately 40 mornings.

The final decision about school schedules and bus routes is based on information gathered from the road check team, NCDOT, local law enforcement and the latest weather forecasts.

That decision is normally made before the first school bus departs at 5:25 a.m. and is announced in several ways: a statement at the top of all pages of school websites at www.wataugaschools.org; via local media outlets; by automated phone messages, email, and text messages to parents; via Twitter at @WataugaSchools; and through a recorded snow line message at (828) 264-0200.

If you have questions about the limited bus routes for your school, you can get more information at wataugaschools.org/limitedroutes, or by contacting the WCS Transportation Department at (828) 264-6391.

Watauga County Schools are closed an average of approximately 15 days per year for snow and ice, with wide variation around that average. The number of days missed has ranged from a low of four days in 1990-91 to a peak of 39 days in 1977-78. The system missed 20 days for weather last school year.

Elliott said as winter weather approaches, it’s important that parents update their contact information with their school’s front office, as that information will be used to announce closing, delay and emergency information.

Watauga High School is set to host its annual Eighth-Grade Parents Nights from 5:30 to 7:00 p.m. on February 10th and 11th. Hosted at WHS, the sessions are intended for rising Freshman and their parents to gain insight and information on the transition from middle to high school.

Students from Green Valley, Blowing Rock, Parkway and Bethel are invited to attend on Feb. 10. The session for students from Hardin Park, Valle Crucis, Cove Creek and Mabel will be held on Feb. 11. Homeschool, Grace Academy and Two Rivers students may elect to attend either session.

The sessions will start with an assembly hosted by next year’s Freshman Counselor Samantha Elam that gives families a brief overview of operations at Watauga High School.

“At the assembly, we will go over what students and parents can expect starting high school at Watauga,” Elam said. “We cover the daily bell schedule, our attendance policies and expectations as well as FLEX — our daily block when students can get help on projects and assignments or seek individual assistance from teachers in a particular content area.”

Elam said parents and students could also expect to learn about the Watauga Innovation Academy — Watauga County’s Schools innovative high school that allows students to earn college credit alongside their high school course work.

Information will also be provided on athletic eligibility and other extracurricular activities available to students.

After the assembly, families are invited to tour the high school and attend an academics fair where teachers from each department will be on hand to answer questions about their subject area.

For more information on Eighth-Grade Parents nights, call Watauga High School at (828) 264-2407 or speak to your child’s middle school counselor.

At Mabel School, sixth-graders in Benjamin Brown’s agriculture class are stationed in the school’s vegetable patch. The field that plays host to the small garden shares duty as a playground for Mabel’s younger students, but the sprinting group of seven-year-olds in the distance are no distraction to Brown’s middle-schoolers, who are hard at work harvesting dried green beans to be replanted in the Spring.

The students are among the first groups at Mabel and Cove Creek schools to take advantage of agriculture classes at the middle school level, which until this school year, were only available at Watauga High School.

While WHS has a long tradition of strong agricultural education and one of the most successful FFA programs in the state, it’s Brown’s hope that by expanding the program to students in middle school, Watauga County Schools can improve ag education across the district and further connect younger students to their world.

“We have become so distant from the sources of our food — most people have little to no experience with the food growing process,” Brown said. “Our ag education program is focused on educating students on where their food comes from and the hard work and effort that is put into producing the food most people just buy at the grocery store.”

Brown said while it was important to expand his student’s understanding of the complex processes that bring food to our tables and to give them hands on experience in the field, each of his students seemed to connect with different aspects of ag education according to their interests.

“My sixth grade students are connecting the most with the plant science topics,” Brown said. “Every time I bring up gardening they are eager to share their own experiences and learn more about good gardening practices. My seventh-graders are starting to understand and become engaged with the reasons we need to preserve our land and resources to ensure a healthier earth. Currently, they are connecting with those ideas on a global scale looking at the amount of land, water and food imports and exports for different countries all across the world.”

Brown said his ag classes offer today’s middle-schoolers a much broader and more technologically connected focus than similar studies might have in the past.

“Most people assume agriculture education is the same as it was 20 years ago, and while in some ways that is true, so much has changed,” Brown said. “Agriculture is a viable field for everyone who is interested and everyone can have an important role to play in the field, no matter their interests.”

Brown said Ag classes weren’t limited to students interested in farming — the field had expanded to touch almost every aspect of modern life.

“Agriculture as a whole is an exponentially growing field, so the secondary education opportunities are increasing. Students interested in agriculture can do anything from welding to advanced biochemical research — the opportunities are endless. These classes give students hands-on Ag skills they can use to improve their lives, whether they take them for fun or they want to feed their families.”

Currently, Watauga County Schools offers ag classes at the middle school level at Cove Creek and Mabel School, but Superintendent Dr. Scott Elliott said the system hoped to expand the program in the future.

“We are very pleased with the reception our new agriculture classes have gotten at the middle school level,” Elliott said. “As a district we are committed to sustainability and environmental education on several fronts, so we were proud to be able to bring these programs to our middle school students.”

Access to reliable high speed internet at home is something many people take for granted across the country, but Watauga County, like many rural communities, is home to some areas where broadband internet is not readily available.

Watauga County Schools — which provides computers to every student in eighth through twelfth grade to take home — recently received a grant from the 1Million Project that hopes to address internet access issues for Watauga High School students at home.

The 1Million Project grant will issue WCS students without home internet access with a wireless cellular hotspot that allows for a high speed internet connection from any location free of charge.

Providing internet coverage all hours of the day, the devices operate on cellular network technology that may cover areas across the county that hard-wired networks haven’t yet reached.

WHS Students were polled about their level of internet access at the start of the school year as their computers were issued. More than 100 high schoolers indicated they did not have broadband access in their home.

Watuaga County Schools Technology Director Nancy Zeiss, who led the effort to bring the 1Million Project grant to the system, said ensuring student’s access to high speed internet was vital to a modern education.

“It’s increasingly important that our students are able to reliably access the internet from home,” Zeiss said. “Through their own self-reporting and conversations with teachers and counselors, we hope to get these devices in the hands of students who need them most. I think it will have a tremendous impact for those students who have struggled to access online school work from home in the past.”

Watauga High School is set to hold an information session for families who indicated interest in receiving a hotspot at 6 p.m. on Tuesday, Aug. 27 in the WHS auditorium. The meeting will provide an overview of the program and allow interested students to sign up for a device.

Zeiss said she hoped to have the devices in student hands in early September.

For more information, call the Watauga High School help desk at (828) 264-2407, Ext. 12209.