Ever since 2021, snow days have turned into remote snow days, and it continues into the 2024-2025 school year. Photo by Compare Fibre via Unsplash.
If you have ever experienced a true snow day, consider yourself lucky. Waking up early and realizing that you can go back to sleep without a care. Drinking rich hot chocolate while watching a movie that you’ve longed to see and warmed by the toastiness of a blanket. Breathing in the refreshing, brisk air as you create snow angels, build snowmen, and pummel your friends and family with snowballs. Beautiful memories that will be cherished forever, as there will be no more snow days to make these memories.
The New York City Department of Education has banned snow days and replaced them with remote learning, or remote snow days.
If you’re wondering: When? Why? How did this happen? It’s simple, we’ll just have to go back in time.
Snow days are days that almost every kid looks forward to. It’s a day of no school, a day of relaxing, and a day of fun. They occur when there is a snow storm on a school day or the day before it, and it produces too much snow that makes it difficult to travel through. The Mayor’s Office or school administrators decide if the community can handle the frosty weather. If they decide no, then this information is shared to parents and students through emails, social media, and news articles and broadcasts.
This was the routine that most students had for years when a snow storm arrived. The thrill when you see your school officially declare that you can stay home for the day, the despair when your school didn’t. However, this cycle was disrupted in 2021.
But before the year 2021 was the year 2020, when NYC schools were shut down by the COVID-19 pandemic. Mar. 13 was the last “normal school day” for many students during the 2019-2020 school year. On Mar. 15, former Mayor Bill de Blasio gave a life-changing announcement for students-due to the health threat of the Coronavirus, schools will move from the classrooms to online. Students will meet with their teachers and classmates on online meetings, this new routine being called remote learning.
Remote learning is what inspired remote snow days. During the 2020-2021 school year, students did not get off the computer and continued learning no matter how bad the weather was outside. However, when the calendar for the 2021-2022 school year came out, or the year that students were finally able to come back to school, the truth was revealed. Snow days were officially over.
The DOE explained, “Over the years, the DOE introduced additional holiday observances as part of the school calendar, and has contractual obligations which limit the number of possible school days.” NYC has a law that requires schools to have 180 days of instruction. Remote learning provides the solution to prevent schools from going below the 180-day mark.
Mayor Eric Adams further justified the establishment of remote snow days in a 2024 WPIX-TV interview.
He stated, “We fell back in education because of COVID. We cannot afford our young people to miss school days.”
The DOE shared through the 2024-2025 NYC school calendar that, “On days when school buildings are closed due to inclement weather or other emergencies, all students and families should plan on participating in remote learning.”
Now, students can still learn without facing the dangers of the freezing cold. Nevertheless, remote snow days are far from perfect.
Remote snow days are nothing like in-person school days. Students are stuck staring at pixels the entire school day with sounds from their devices being the only sign of civilization outside their homes. Remote learning makes it difficult for students to interact with other students and teachers, proving to be detrimental to a student’s learning experience.
Principal Colby elaborated, “Many students feel a lot more comfortable and a lot better with in-person learning. There’s a lot more personalized interaction between students and other students, between students and teachers, and with teachers who are planning together.”
The home environment proves to hurt a child’s education in other ways as well.
“My one main hardship though was how loud my house could be, distracting me from my work,” recalled Christina, a senior at Cardozo.
“None of the students want to be there, thus they don’t pay attention and do stuff on the side. It doesn’t feel like a good use of time,” Sophia, another high school senior noted about her Zoom meetings. She highlighted the ease for students to lose focus from school due to the large variety of captivating activities found in a student’s personal home.
Teachers are also not certain if their teaching is actually getting to their students. Lisa Wong, a speech therapist for the DOE, described her experience on the last official remote snow day. “The kids that did show up did not turn on the camera and so I didn’t really know if they were engaged, if they were really talking to me too much, and if they were doing things at the same time that I was teaching.”
On a regular snow day, students wouldn’t even be learning and teachers wouldn’t even be teaching. Rather, they would be creating memories with their loved ones. Or, at least relaxing and taking the time to carry out important duties.
Mariana, a high school junior, expressed her grief for the death of snow days. “It is horrible to know that this new generation won’t be able to experience the joy of snow days. So, even though we do get to stay at home, we still have to wake up early and attend the classes or else we’ll be marked absent and be penalized for it.”
Since remote snow days will be operating during the same hours as regular school days, this means that children will have less time playing outside in the snow and hanging out with friends and that parents will have more time stressing to get their children, especially the young ones, ready for a day meant for no learning.
To continue, it is also not clear if NYC is sufficiently prepared to handle almost one million students when a remote snow day is declared.
The last official remote snow day was last year on Feb. 13, and it was simply a disaster. With hundreds of thousands of students signing in for remote learning at the same time, the system was overloaded which prevented many of these students from logging into their classes. IBM, the tech vendor that supports the DOE’s system, stated that everything was stable by 10:15 a.m.
The DOE and IBM officials have concluded that this problem stems from their 2019 contract-IBM was only required to handle up to 400 “transactions per second.” In September 2023, IBM had upped this number to 1,400 transactions, but on Feb. 13, the system began to fail and showed the “error message” to those unsuccessfully logging in. As the time was ticking for students to “get” to their classes on time, IBM tried to increase the number to 3,000 but had to settle on 2,000 transactions per second. Yet, this was still not enough and had some students late to their classes.
The DOE had come up with a potential short-term solution to this problem and announced it during the City Council oversight hearing on March 6, 2024. The idea? Staggering start times.
Instead of all students of all DOE public schools signing in at the same time, students would sign in at different “start times [that] could be assigned by grade level and would need to be spread over a little more than one hour,” according to Chalkbeat. This may cause much confusion with teachers, students, and parents and leave everyone even more irritated than before.
Hopefully the DOE has improved their systems or at least found an alternative so that Feb. 13 never happens again. Since remote snow days are staying for the long run, the day should be as smooth as snow-which many of us don’t get the chance to play with on these days.