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City high school seniors who needed to take a Regents exam to graduate this month with a local diploma will not need to reschedule the test, state education officials announced today.

Instead, those students will be able to use passing course grades to fulfill their graduation requirements. Students are normally required to take five Regents exams to graduate. Students must score above a 55 for the test to be counted towards a local diploma; for the more rigorous Regents diploma, they must reach the 65 mark.

Seniors who want to earn a Regents diploma must wait to re-take the exams in June, the next time they are offered. The January tests that would have been given today will not be re-administered. This raises the stakes for some seniors who plan to graduate in June by reducing the number of opportunities they have to pass the exam this year.

State Education Commissioner David Steiner encouraged students to wait and sit for the exams later in the year. ”We hold a Regents Diploma as the goal for all,” he said in a statement. “However, this is the fairest course of action for the seniors affected this week.”

City and state officials spent the day discussing how to accommodate students who needed to take exams today to graduate as planned.

“We are pleased the State took this step that will alow those seniors with sufficient credits and coursework to graduate this month,” Chancellor Cathie Black said in a statement. “However, we fully understand how disappointing it must be to all of those students who studied so hard for their Regents exams, and for the teachers and parents who worked with them.”

City officials estimated that between 400 and 500 students would benefit from the state’s decision. Last year, just under 3,500 students graduated between January and May. Of those students, roughly 400 used the winter Regents exams to fulfill graduation requirements. (more…)

Three Brooklyn students — from left to right, 7-year-olds Olivia and Jai and 9-year-old Isabella — used their snow day to build a snow fort in Prospect Park today.

We know what high school teachers would have been doing if there had been school today: proctoring Regents exams. But we’re wondering what other teachers and students would have been doing today if 19 inches of snow hadn’t fallen.

For Jai Jaroslaw, age “seven and three-quarters” and a second-grader at Brooklyn’s P.S. 321, the unexpected day off meant getting to spend the morning in Prospect Park building a snow fort.

If it had been a normal day? ”I guess I would be doing math, and now I would have lunch,” he said. Jai’s father, Victor Jaroslaw, a teacher at Fort Greene’s P.S. 46, would have spent the day teaching science.

What would your day have looked like if school had not been cancelled, and how are you spending the day instead? Tell us in the comments.

A big question mark hanging over today’s snow closure is what will happen to the high school students who were supposed to take Regents exams this morning.

Students are required to take the exams to graduate, and today’s test date was particularly important for some students hoping to graduate this month. City officials said today that schools ordered nearly 100,000 exams in six subjects, though frequently the number of tests ordered is larger than the number of students who sit for them.

No one seems to know yet exactly when those students will get a chance to take their exams. A GothamSchools reader told us that she spent 45 minutes waiting on 311, the city’s information hotline, this morning, before being told only that today’s administration had been canceled.

“We are in discussion with state education officials about finding a solution for students who were unable to take the Regents exams scheduled for today,” Mayor Bloomberg said during a press conference to discuss the surprise storm. “This is not a problem only for New York City. There are other cities in the southern part of the state that have exactly the same problem.”

A Department of Education spokesman said the city hoped to finalize arrangements with the state today. State policy is typically not to administer make-up Regents exams. (more…)

More than half of New York City’s public school students didn’t come to school today after Chancellor Cathie Black decided to keep schools open after a snowstorm.

Although most roads were plowed after nine inches of snow fell overnight, the Department of Education’s attendance figures show that only 46 percent of students came to class today. Students in elementary school had the highest turnout — about 50 percent of them showed up — but older students pulled the citywide average down.

Only 47 percent of middle schoolers and 37 percent of high schoolers came to school today. These numbers correspond to what we’ve been hearing anecdotally from teachers, who reported class sizes cut down by two-thirds or more.

“You can’t teach a real class with 30% to 50% of your students, so, what exactly was the point of this?” wrote one teacher in the comments section. Another said: (more…)

A Brooklyn road this morning.

Schools Chancellor Joel Klein made the official decision to close the New York City schools this morning, at 20 minutes before 6 o’clock. That was in time for TV news stations to declare the news by 5:50 a.m., but too late for some teachers to sleep in — especially those who’d already begun their morning commutes.

Here’s some of the testimonials NYC Educator collected after asking where his readers were when they heard the snow day news:

“I was freezing my ass off at a bus stop waiting for a 36 bus to take me to school.”

“I was already on the road from LI when the wife called. I was certain she misheard – so I didn’t turn around until 1010 said the same a minute or two later.”

“I was just about to leave for school and got about 3 text messages at once. A whole morning of checking the news and I got the most important news via text message… go figure.”

NYC Educator points out that his children’s school district, in a suburb outside the city, alerted his family to the news the night before, via a phone message. “There was nothing that changed, or was going to change, so dramatically between 4:00 and 6:00 that warranted such a long wait,” one of his readers writes. “I’m not saying he needed to announce it last night, but 4 or 5 in the morning would’ve been considerate.”

Department of Education spokeswoman Melody Meyer, who had the privilege of delivering the good news to reporters (I got my e-mail at 6:35 a.m.), says the system made the decision in the morning deliberately, after spending the night consulting with sanitation workers and bus companies to scope out the situation. “We need to take input into the morning driving conditions, and we can’t do that until the morning,” Meyer told me.

The timing does not seem to be unique to Klein. Eric Nadelstern, the city’s chief schools officer and a longtime DOE employee, said he’s never heard of a snow day being announced before 6 a.m. in the city. And he’s been in the system for 37 years.