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Big student absences for Memorial Day make-up

http://66.225.205.104/JR20090526.mp3

Charlotte-Mecklenburg Schools held class yesterday to makeup for a snow day in March. But a quarter of all students in the district took Memorial Day off anyway. WFAE's Julie Rose reports: Most school kids will say there's nothing better than waking up to a snowstorm and finding out school's been cancelled. That is, until the time comes to make up that snow day. Yesterday was one of the make-up days for an unusually snowy winter in Charlotte. The CMS Board of Education hoped families would choose education over their Memorial Day activities. But classrooms were sparse, with more than a quarter of the district's 137,000 students absent. That's 7-and-a-half times more than were absent last Monday. And four-and-a-half times more than the Monday before, when concerns over swine flu were at a peak. A few more teachers took the day off, too. CMS says 872 teachers were absent yesterday compared to a typical Monday absence rate of between five and seven hundred. Yesterday was the last of three snow day make-ups for CMS. The district has limited options because state law requires school end for summer by June 10th.