New York City’s public school students will be deprived of their much-coveted snow days – perhaps forever, an education official said.
“There are technically no more snow days,” David C. Banks, the city’s Department of Education chancellor, said in an interview with WNYW’s “Good Day New York.”
He explained that the remote-learning technology implemented during the coronavirus pandemic will allow students to continue their studies on days when the snow is too heavy for them to commute to school – when kids might have ordinarily gone sledding with their friends.
“So, sorry kids – no more snow days, but it’s going to be good for you!” he said.
New York City public schools first scrapped snow days in 2020 amid the first year of the pandemic and continued the policy into the following school year, citing the need to meet the state’s requirement of 180 days of learning per year.
The city’s Department of Education did not immediately respond to a request for comment early Wednesday.
School districts in other states have also done away with snow days, though some places – including Washington, D.C. – have held onto them. Fairfax County Public Schools in Virginia, for example, budgeted up to five snow days last year.
Ben Blair, the principal of Rogers Park Montessori in Chicago, told WFLD earlier this year that the days off could be good for students.
“I think there’s value in these moments of reckless, joyful abandon,” he told the station. “Whether flopping in the snow or meeting neighbors out on the street shoveling, that human connection that serendipitously happens during a snow day is fantastic.”
In places with disappearing snow days, the switch has come to the disappointment of students and the opposition of some parents for whom the events are reminders of their own childhoods. The stresses of making sure their children are engaged with remote learning while juggling their own work responsibilities are also top of mind.
At the same time, snow days have been a headache for officials in New York City and other parts of the country who are forced to make tough calls that are often later criticized. Years before the coronavirus pandemic closed schools, officials nationwide had been searching for alternatives to giving students the day off for inclement weather, with some experimenting with remote learning, Edutopia, a publication by the George Lucas Educational Foundation, reported in 2018.
Although Banks said remote learning technology has enabled the transition away from snow days in New York City, some lower-income families have said it doesn’t work for them. In December, five parents sued the city officials, claiming the department supplied them with faulty equipment and offered no technical support. The case is ongoing.
Teachers, meanwhile, have been told to set up a “digital classroom” in which a lesson plan is prepared and ready in case of an emergency closure, a United Federation of Teachers union spokesperson told the New York Post.
On Tuesday, the hosts of “Good Day New York” jokingly booed Banks’s snow day announcement.
“I know,” he replied. “That’s the way I used to feel.”
(c) 2022, The Washington Post · Julian Mark
This is terrible. Adams should resign.
worst decision
No seichel. What do you think the kids are going learn that day already?
Move to free Florida. No snow days but we do have a governor that appreciates kids needs and the simple joys in life that liberals hate for you to enjoy.
And we do get hurricane days.
When the little boy discovered that the Corona Virus was the perpetrator responsible for creating remote-learning school days on days when the snow filled streets would have ordinarily given him a day off, he promised that he would, one day, get even with the “evil pathogen”.
“So, Mr. evil one,” the boy said to the virus, “you haven’t caused enough trouble already?! Now you also want to deprive me of my days off?! I promise you, hideous one, I will get even with you! One day, I will develop a vaccine and a pill that eliminates you from the world entirely!”
However, not to be outdone by the little boy, the wicked virus responded: “Silly child, as long as I wear my facemask, you can’t do nothing to me!”
“Besides,” said the virus, “I’ve got a lot of variant body doubles who look and act a lot like me, you eliminate one of us, the next guy takes over! Ha!”
“Michael,” the boy’s mother called out to the child, “who’s that friend of yours that you’re talking to?! I don’t like the tone of his voice! Tell him to leave immediately!”
This is good!
Well, if you believe in global warning then it doesn’t snow anymore.
How will they all be learning remotely? The laptops that the city gave out from the school system were never replaced and the ones that the students took home they either appropriated for themselves or are broken.