Snow Days May Never Be the Same
Snow days are uniquely beloved by kids in wintry climates. After a night of hoping, children earn a blissful surprise: a morning spent sleeping in and a day of playing outside. As Cindy Burau, a fourth-grade teacher in Lake Tahoe, California, put it: Snow days are “like gifts from the heavens that we all need: a sigh, a moment.” The pandemic has threatened this tradition. For students who attend school remotely every day, bad weather no longer affects their ability to attend class. And schools that have returned to in-person teaching or hybrid models likely still have remote-learning setups that they can turn to. With virtual school available as an alternative to canceling class, some schools have seen fit to put an end to the snow day as generations of children have known it.
On the one hand, students are after losing classroom time because of COVID-19. (This is more likely to be the case for and students living in .) Some educators argue that students can’t afford to miss more school this year—even when it snows. On the other hand, kids love snow days, and many parents welcome even a short break from the daily grind of helping with Zoom classes. The products of a practical need to keep students at home during dangerous travel conditions, snow days’ primary purpose has become bringing children joy. The pandemic has taken so much away from kids, snow-day advocates say. Do we have to take this away too?
