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Since Jan. 1, roughly a dozen major winter storms have shuttered school doors around the United States and kept students home.
Before COVID-19, snow days like these were routine, not even worth mentioning. But with the switch to virtual schooling came predictions that days off from school because of weather would soon be a thing of the past. There would be no reason to cancel classes if they could just go remote. An EdWeek survey from November 2020 even reported that around 70% of principals and school district officials had converted or were considering converting snow days to remote learning days.
But a 74 survey of policies around the country finds that while some districts have made the shift — or tried to — others have gone back to that time-honored tradition.
Seattle Public Schools used to build snow days into its academic calendar but ended the practice after the pandemic. While a traditional snow day isn’t completely off the table, the district usually implements remote learning when schools close due to emergencies, said Tyler Hamilton, Seattle’s director of school operations.
“Are we getting the same level of quality instruction at the end of the school year? Is having some type of instruction remotely going to be more meaningful than having paused completely and then doing some type of makeup day?” Hamilton said. “It really is more of … looking to provide as much consistency as possible for kids.”
When the entire district had to switch to virtual classes on Feb. 5 and 6 because of a snowstorm, some students remembered the routine, while younger children who weren’t yet in school at the beginning of the pandemic struggled, Hamilton said. High school and middle school teachers were expected to host classes like normal, while elementary teachers had a less structured schedule.
“Second graders [were] showing off their bedroom to their friends and being excited as like a show and tell opportunity, which was similar to a lot of our earlier days of COVID,” Hamilton said. “If my [high school] class was normally a 55-minute class with my algebra teacher, I’m going to have that same time of day with that algebra teacher.”
Attendance policies were the same as for in-person classes — but students weren’t counted as being late if they didn’t join the class on time. Hamilton said the district is still analyzing attendance data from the two snow days.
For some schools, attendance routinely lags during remote learning on snow days. Last year, attendance rates in Pittsburgh-area schools on virtual days ranged from 99% to as low as 66%, according to the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette.
New York City Public Schools tried to implement remote learning on a snow day in February 2024 for the first time since its no-snow day policy was introduced two years earlier. School officials deemed it a failure after students were unable to sign in. The district tested the system later that summer and still plans to use it for future snow days.
Challenges like access to the internet or computers at home have made some schools rethink their remote learning plans.
One superintendent in Maine said his district of 2,300 students will continue traditional snow days because some kids can’t access online learning.
“Not every family can be linked in,” Superintendent Christian Elkington told the Sun Journal. “Not every family has the same supports and services.”
Other districts have to implement traditional snow days because state regulations leave them no choice.
In New Jersey, state law doesn’t allow remote learning to count toward the 180 school days required each year unless schools are closed for three consecutive days because of a state-declared emergency. Virtual classes were permitted during the pandemic because of an executive order. Last year, lawmakers proposed a bill to allow remote instruction during snow days, but it failed to advance.
Alaska schools also have to use traditional snow days after the state’s education commissioner told superintendents in December that remote learning shouldn’t count as school days because it doesn’t “adequately meet students’ needs.”
In Seattle, Hamilton said administrators are still assessing how the two days of remote learning went. Some parents reported technical or logistical difficulties.
“As a whole, the day went much smoother than some of our initial implementations,” he said. “We’re going through our data right now looking at how many students and staff members were online [and] how long they were online.”
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