Last month, as the Northeast prepared for its first big winter storm and parents, educators and soup makers across the country began to weigh in on the suddenly urgent new issue, the Greenville County School District did something so sensible that it’s hard to believe it came from a school district in South Carolina: it killed snow days.
Snowy days, of course, have long been a children’s dream – those magical mornings when they wake up and find the land covered with a layer of cold down and classes are canceled. The problem is not so much with the snowy days, but with what happens after the snowy day passes. Or rather, what does not happen.
State law requires SC schools to provide students with 180 days of classroom instruction each year; it also requires districts to include three replacement days in their calendars to ensure students have all 180 days, even if snow or other emergencies force them to close schools on normal school days. And everyone hates makeup days.
Like many education officials in parts of the country where winter precipitation often interrupts the school year, officials in Greenville reasoned that since the pandemic forced them to learn to provide education remotely and the federal government endorsed efforts to place a Chromebook in Every backpack and high-speed Internet service in every home, there’s no reason to cancel school just because school buses may not be able to get around safely.
This kind of thinking in snowier climates inspired Campbell Soup Co.’s retreat campaign to “save snow days” – which we would like to be making up for and which actually resulted in some districts giving up on the idea of putting education first .
But, as Eric Connor of the Post and Courier reports, Greenville County Schools took advantage of some temporary laws to put off the required replacement days of the recently launched 2021-22 school calendars. In place of those days, there was a note explaining that the district “will automatically operate on the Service Plan (eLearning) if the school buildings are closed on a regular service day.”
Our objection to snowy days is not that students should not be able to play in the snow on the rare occasions when our state is covered by a fluffy layer of winter precipitation. It’s just that our state shouldn’t be able to steal them from an education day, and that’s what happens very often.
After school districts complete the first three days of snow, state law allows them to “forgive” – or, more precisely, steal – three days lost. And it allows the state Department of Education to authorize forgiveness three more days after that, and both districts and the department routinely do so. In the 2018-19 school year, school districts across the state dispensed 96 missed days and the Department of Education dispensed another 17. If schools close for more than nine days, the Legislature is known to intervene and forgive more school days .
There will always be cases where schools will still need to cancel classes. You cannot expect students to learn and teachers to teach if there are widespread and prolonged power outages in the district, for example. And it is unrealistic to expect remote participation when “snow days” are really hurricane days, necessary for evacuations that people actually obey.
But, as Greenville schools must demonstrate, there is no longer any reason to cancel classes routinely – and therefore there is no longer an excuse to tell students that it is very inconvenient to provide them with the class time promised by state law.
It is encouraging to see all state legislators who are so passionate about not deceiving children in their promised education that they joined us by arguing that school districts need to allow students to attend classes in person during the pandemic, rather than relegating them. to online teaching – classes only. We hope that this passion for learning extends into the day of snow, and that they pass a law that allows – or even compels – all districts to offer remote classes when they have to close buildings for the winter.
Although these online classes in most cases are not a substitute for face-to-face classes, they are much better than the nothing we have given to so many students when the weather is bad.
