Snow Days are the best. 

Everyone from students all the way up to the district superintendent gets a tap on the shoulder by Frosty, and told, “You are free.  Nobody will expect anything from you today.”

JP, North Royalton’s former assistant superintendent, explained how it worked at a Friday Happy Hour. 

When bad weather is coming, he is on the phone with his counterparts at other suburban districts.  It might be the evening before or they might be up all night.  JP may drive around the district at 4 am to check roads, or go to the bus garage to talk to the maintenance supervisor.  Nobody wants to look too eager or reluctant to blow the whistle.  

My worst Snow Day.

Early in my career at North Royalton, Carol asked me to be on the Ohio Graduation Test Science Content Committee.  It was an honor and a perk.  The committee was composed of about forty people who were accomplished science teachers and college science professors from all over the state.

Every few months, we’d be summoned to Columbus to stay and meet at the Hyatt Hotel for three days.  Our job was to debate the relevance and appropriateness of each question that would go on the science portion of the OGT.  My field is Physics, so I didn’t contribute to the discussion on Biology or Earth Science, but did discuss those questions with my colleagues sitting near me.  It was fascinating.  One woman had done field work with chimps.  

The schedule was like this:

  • Breakfast at the hotel restaurant
  • Start meeting at 9 am,
  • Break for a variety of fruits or bagels at 10:30
  • Buffet lunch at noon
  • Break for giant chocolate chip cookies and coffee at 2:30
  • Wrap up at 4:30
  • Go out for dinner.

Submit mileage and dinner receipts for reimbursement.

It was great.

By the second year, fewer people were attending, and they stopped paying for dinner.  By the third year, they wanted all discussion to be amongst the whole group, and the bagels and cookies went away.

The only good part was being able to sleep in to 8 am, instead of getting up at 6 am for school.

One Monday morning, my department chair called me at 5 am to announce that we had a snow day.  So, I didn’t get to sleep in, and I had a meeting all day instead of having the day off.  Tuesday was also a snow day that I didn’t get.

I resigned my committee assignment.

My Best Snow Day

One of the nice things about a snow day, is knowing that all of your colleagues have the day off.  For a few years, after we got the call-off at 5 am, a few of us would drive to Holiday Valley in New  York to ski all day.

Memorable Snow Days

One year, we had a snow day on the Friday that was the first day of the Cleveland Auto Show at the IX Center.  The Auto Show is so much better when it’s not packed with people.

In my early years at Normandy, I was working like mad to build the program.  I went into school on a snow day so I could get a ton of stuff done without interruption.  The next day, we got an all-staff email telling us that if the roads are too treacherous for school buses, it’s too treacherous for teachers to come in.  That’s back when Admin cared about teachers.

Snow Day Preference

Technology and weakness have changed snow days.

Back in the day, the district would wait until the roads were bad and likely to stay bad, before calling a snow day.  They rarely blew the whistle the night before.  Everyone would get up a bit early and listen to the radio.  The districts were announced in alphabetical order, so you’d wait to hear if we called off.  That was fun because you never knew, but there was more chance a person wouldn’t find out until going in.

When they started doing phone trees, then text blasts, it was more convenient.

When Facebook was popular, it was fun to watch the speculation the night before.  The Earth Science guys knew meteorology, so they’d post radar maps and make informed predictions.

Calling off for cold was not as fun because there wouldn’t be much snow and nobody wanted to go outside.  They never really said it, but if it was below zero, they’d usually call off.

I’m against the wind chill call off.  If the wind chill is below zero, the temperature might be in the teens.  Admin said they were worried about the students who walked to school, but they could just call an Uber for both of those kids.  Nobody really walks or rides a bike to school.

Early in my career, I had a class website.  My rule was, “If I haven’t posted anything by 9 am, then don’t worry about it and enjoy the day.”  It may seem cruel to post work on a snow day, but I set my schedule to have chapter tests on Friday or just before a break or long weekend.  If the test day wasn’t going to change, they might need to do some work to prepare.

Ten years ago, when Google Classroom came out, Admin mandated that approach.  By that time, they changed the term to “Calamity Day” because “Snow Day” sound like too much fun.  Each teacher had to have a calamity day lesson plan for students.  It was dumb, because there was no assignment that was always relevant and could be shoved into the curriculum at any time. 

I had something about watching a Mythbusters episode on Youtube, and analyzing how it corresponded to the Scientific Method.  No student was ever asked to do that.

With all the work that teachers did to build an online curriculum during the horrible Covid year, I thought that Snow Days would be a thing of the past.  It hasn’t worked that way.  Admin is more inclined to call a Calamity Day because nobody cares about education, but teachers aren’t encouraged to require students to do anything on a Calamity Day because they may not have their Chromebook at home and you can’t expect them to use their phones for anything productive.