What Ever Happened To Snow Days

As I type this, the Board of Directors here at the Institute is having their second Flexible Instruction Day of the week.

As in many places, we kicked off the week with a snow-piling blizzard and moved immediately from there to intense cold. And as in many places, it provides a chance to reflect on the choices that districts make.

To begin with, we're seeing a result of the choice to start school early. In sprawling rural districts, that means students standing at the bus stop at 6:30 or even earlier. So sometimes that means a two hour delay just to give the sun time to come up and the temperature to get into tolerable levels.

We're also seeing the difference between district approaches to what a canceled day means.

No districts in my county use distance learning for snow days. For one thing, everyone hated it during the covid shutdowns. For another, these rural districts include too many students who do not have access to a reliable internet connection. "Remote instruction" during the shutdown meant teachers (like the Chief Marital Officer here at the Institute) spent part of their days hand delivering printed packets to homes. 

My district's Flexible Instruction Days are simple enough. Back during the first week of school, students were given a big folder with five Flexible Instruction packets inside. When a FID is called, I pull out the next packet and the boys do the work. Here at the Institute, I check their work and they fix any mistakes; I cannot guarantee that level of oversight is present in all homes. The packets take maybe a half hour and involve a smattering of each subject area. Having been created by teachers back at the beginning of the year before meeting the students and intended to be used sometime during the winter, if ever, the packets are not exactly loaded with rigor. But once the packet is completed, the student has the rest of the day for traditional snow day activities (right now the Board of Directors is battling with Pokemon cards).

For the district, the beauty of this system is that the day will not have to be made up. It provides roughly 0.02 % of a real school day, and yet counts for the whole thing, which, at a minimum, seems intellectually dishonest.

Meanwhile, some other districts do not allow for Flexible Instruction Days-- it's get the students to school or nothing. Their opposition to the idea is hard to explain, but I suspect it's leftover from Covid, when some local boards totally bought the idea that the shut down was an evil teacher union plot, and so they'd be damned if they would ever be tricked into any form of remote learning ever again. So when they cancel school, students get a true snow day, and lose a day of vacation later in the year.

Does it make a difference? My strictly anecdotal survey suggests that Flexible Instruction Days make it easier for the district to just go ahead and call things off. This week, everyone called off on Monday. But while my district has called two Flexible Instruction Days since, the most other non-FID districts have done is call one or two two hour delays. 

Is it better to have a traditional snow day? Hard to say. Historically we are more likely to call school off over temperature than over snowfall, which means students are mostly trapped inside rather than soaring over Rockwellesque snowdrifts with their sled-shaped plastic sheets. One might argue that the act of going through the motions of a pretend work day while nature has dropped a pile of chaos on the world is good prep for the work world, but I've never been a fan of the Your Life Is Going To Suck Later So It Might As Well Suck Now family of school policies. 

FID is either the best of both worlds (You get some education-flavored stuff with plenty of time left over to play) or possible the worst (Neither a true day off or a functional day of education). Maybe we should stop trying to have pretend school and just suck it up, admit that nature has beaten us, and get an actual day of school in later.