With the winter weather making its presence felt in the region, the Carter County School System is quickly depleting its stockpile of “snow days” for the year.

“We had 13 days built in,” Carter County Director of Schools Dr. Kevin Ward told the Elizabethton Star on Thursday. “Today we are on number nine, and we are looking at number 10 tomorrow (Friday), so that leaves us with three days.”

In October, the school system had to use one of the days for a weather closure that was not snow related. On October 24, heaving rainfall lead to flooding in the Roan Mountain area, prompting the closure of schools as several roads and bridges were damaged in the community. Cloudland High School also suffered damage in the flooding.

The remainder of the closures have happened as a result of snow and ice causing hazardous roadways, with many of the snow days being used in the past two weeks.

Last year, the school system was able to make it through the winter without exhausting all of the snow days and was able to take the full amount of the scheduled Spring Break, which is often deleted from the calendar to make up for days missed due to weather.

“This winter is definitely different,” Ward said.

One of the things that leads to the closure of schools are the road conditions in the higher elevation areas of the county such as Roan Mountain and the Elk Mills and Poga communities. Oftentimes, Ward said, roads in the lower areas such as Valley Forge, Central or Happy Valley will be clear while the roads in Roan Mountain, Elk Mills, and Poga are still hazardous.

During the winter months, Ward said he frequently has parents ask why the schools must be closed system-wide instead of just in the areas where the roads are dangerous.

“The average daily attendance and the testing schedule are the two biggest reasons we can’t do that,” Ward said.

Some of the school system’s funding, as well as some of the state’s evaluations, are at least partially based on the system’s average daily attendance as a whole. As such, if schools are in session in part of the county but not at certain schools, all of the students at the closed schools must be considered absent for the day when calculating the average daily attendance. Those “absences” would then impact the attendance score which in turn would impact funding and evaluations.

State regulations also mandate the number of days each school system must attend during a school year. “The state requires schools to have 180 days in the year,” Ward said.

If, for example, Cloudland Elementary and Cloudland High School were to close for snow on four days and the other schools remained in session, those two schools would still be in attendance for an additional four days after the other schools dismissed for the summer, according to Ward.

In addition to setting a number of days for attendance, the state also sets scheduling for benchmarks and testing throughout the school year. Closing only certain schools would cause those students to fall behind in the state’s testing calendar.