Snow days’ appeal lingers
Districts opt out of state plan to teach remotely when storms blanket area
Several Capital Region school districts are opting out of the state Education Department’s “snow day pilot” program, which for one year gives districts the choice of pivoting to remote instruction during a school-canceling blizzard.
School leaders cite snow day nostalgia and concerns about internet connectivity during winter weather as some of their reasons for keeping up the tradition.
Officials at Germantown Central School District in rural Columbia County said in a memo Thursday that implementing snow days as they have in years past would offer their students a sense of “normalcy” during a difficult time.
“We see the value in our students experiencing a traditional snow day, and we aim to salvage any sense of normalcy possible during this unprecedented school year,” Germantown Superintendent Benjamin Bragg wrote.
State education officials in September announced the pilot which takes advantage of the remote learning infrastructures that school systems have set up to educate children during the COVID -19 pandemic.
“This pilot is in effect for the 2020-21 school year, after which the Department will review the outcome of the pilot in determining whether to continue this flexibility in subsequent school years,” the department’s Director of Education Finance Brian S. Cechnicki wrote in a
memo to superintendents.
Hudson City School District officials wrote that they would not participate due to the area’s history of power outages during winter weather, which would make it difficult for students to get online.
“There are also many elementary students who do not bring home learning devices daily and would not be able to participate in remote instruction on an unexpected snow day,” district leaders said in a note to the school community.
Cairo-durham administrators noted that many students in the mountainous Greene County district do not have access to the internet. Older students rely on accessing the high school’s media center on remote learning days. The district also tends to see outages during extreme weather.
Some private schools in the region say they are also planning to stick with school-free snow days, despite offering a fully remote program to families that request it.
“If ever there was a year when we needed the unintended self-care benefits of unplanned and unstructured off days, it would be 2020-2021,” Albany Academies Head of Schools Chris Lauricella said. “Also, we don’t think it’s wise to add the complexities of moving to remote learning for inclement weather on top of all the other COVID -related plans and protocols we are currently following and constantly revising.”
There are also financial reasons to keep snow days. Gladys Cruz, superintendent of Questar III BOCES, which serves 23 districts in the region, said the organization surveyed members on the snow day option and got a range of responses: positive, negative and undecided.
Superintendents thought extra instructional days during a pandemic would be valuable, but teachers are contracted for 180 days out of the year, so pivoting to remote learning could get expensive, she said.
“When this information first came out, we all thought it was a good idea, then when we continued to look at it, we looked at what the limitations would be,” Cruz said.