Schools statewide will stay closed for an additional two weeks — until April 15 — Gov. Andrew Cuomo said Friday during his daily coronavirus press briefing, but local schools were already planning to be closed through April 20.

This extension essentially allows schools to continue to receive state aid, even when they are closed for the next few weeks, according to local superintendents.

“This was not unexpected, but we were sort of wondering if he was going to extend it or not,” Lake Placid School District Superintendent Roger Catania said.

Tupper Lake School District Superintendent Seth McGowan said his district was already going to be closed through April 20, based on Franklin County’s emergency declaration, which was made before Cuomo’s first announcement earlier this month that closed school through March 31.

Now that the statewide return date has been extended to April 15, schools will not need to decide between opening classrooms too soon and losing state aid, he said.

“We would have had to either open on April 1 or stay closed and have a reduction of state aid as a result,” McGowan said. “All this does is it creates a relief valve so that we don’t have to be thinking about the loss of state aid during the closing.”

All local districts said they were going to stay closed to avoid spreading COVID-19 and just take the financial losses that would have come.

“We rely heavily on state aid,” McGowan said. “It would have been unmanageable to lose state aid, even for a day.”

He said around half of the district’s annual income comes from state aid.

Though there is a five-day gap between Cuomo’s return date and the schools’ date, that is when they are on spring break, so they do not risk losing state aid at that time.

Keene School District Superintendent Daniel Mayberry said this announcement should have been made earlier this week, instead of four days away from when the state was telling schools to return.

“It would have been nice had it come sooner,” Mayberry said. “If (Cuomo) believes the peak of the curve is 21 days out, I think it’s unreasonable to start sending kids back to school and start returning life to normal when you’re about to hit the peak of your cases.”

Mayberry said the governor’s extension is needed to excuse districts from their 180-days-of-school-a-year requirement, on which state aid is based, day-by-day. This requirement had been waived earlier this month, but not for schools that exceed the state’s COVID-19 closure period.

Cuomo cited the high number of cases in New York and a need to “flatten the curve” as reasons for the extension, and said the state may extend the school closings even further in the future.

“We’re going to close the schools for another two weeks, and we’ll reassess at that point,” Cuomo said. “At the end of two weeks, if the same trajectory is going up and there hasn’t been any change, then we’re going to extend it.”