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Frederick County students will spend three days fewer in school this year and not have to take classes beyond June 11 to make up for snow days.

Frederick County Public Schools has received a state waiver allowing it to shave off three days from the required 180.

School system officials applied for the waiver in February and received approval for their request in a letter on Tuesday, said Kathryn B. Groth, school board president.

"We had to do the right thing for our instructional priorities," said Groth, who hopes that schools will have no more weather-related reasons to close this year.

The school board asked the state for a five-day waiver so it could have two extra days in case school has to be canceled again this year, but the state did not allow that, Groth said.

"We had to ask for what we needed," she said.

Requesting the waiver was part of the board's ongoing efforts to make up for 11 instructional days that schools lost this winter because of the snow.

The school system used up all five snow days built into the calendar, which originally ended the school year on June 10. Had schools used no snow days, school would have ended five days earlier.

The school system then took two days away from spring break (March 31 and April 1) and added June 11 to the school year.

But that left officials to figure out how to make up for three more days of lost instruction without having school days spill too far into June.

"The later you go in June ... there isn't a lot of enthusiasm about learning," Groth said.

The board so far has heard both from parents supporting the idea for the waiver and from those who oppose it, Groth said. Some parents asked the board not to cut more instructional time this year.

But Groth said all the calendar changes this year, including asking for the waiver, were aimed to help maximize instructional time, especially in the period before the Maryland School Assessments, which started on Monday.

To make sure that students and teachers had enough classroom time to prepare for the tests, the board made Feb. 23 a full day of instruction as instead of early-dismissal day as originally planned. The school board also eliminated spring parent-teacher conferences and students used March 1 and 2 as full- instead of half-days of instruction.

"It was a bold move to cancel spring conferences," Groth said. "But to me that was a no-brainer. We didn't get any pushback from teachers."

Groth, however, said now it is even more important for parents to stay involved and keep in touch with their children's teachers if they have any concerns about instruction, grades or progress.

"Our teachers are always open and willing to discuss these things," she said.

E-mail Margarita Raycheva at mraycheva@gazette.net.