The End of Snow Days?

For as long as public schools have been around, controversy has swirled around whether or not to close schools. Many districts, up until the 1980s, rarely closed schools, as is demonstrated by this disgruntled Baby Boomer and writer of the regular column “Back in the Day” Alonzo Kittrels of the Philadelphia Tribune.

In recent times, schools have been required to switch to online learning due to snow days, and some have even included remote learning days into their academic calendars, like this one in Maine. But up until now, this has certainly been the exception rather than the norm.

With most school districts shuttered and millions of students now isolated and stuck in their homes, our educational system has been forced to move quicker than ever before. As we all know, change in our public education system moves incredibly slow. As a result, the time is now to begin considering how we will allow for the continuation of learning when students are not in their school buildings.

The following areas should be considered by school districts and boards of education across the country:

Online learning “modules” and learning management systems (LMSs) are not the sole answer. 

With the ever-expanding growth and use of LMSs across the country to manage the movement to distance learning, boards of education will undoubtedly be making cuts to education systems. One potential byproduct of these cuts could be the desire to cut teachers and staff from their work force in order to move toward LMSs. First, do not give in to this desire – the need for teachers, in-person contact, and small class sizes is in fact greater than ever before. Students must continue to have contact with teachers and must still be afforded small student to teacher ratios, thereby further promoting and upholding the mental wellness of the Pandemic Generation. Teachers should not, and will not, go extinct because of this. We must fight to protect every single position that is currently in place. 

Aim for hybrid models

As many schools grapple with how they will manage a return to their school building, plus an almost certain resurgence of the virus in communities everywhere in the fall, hybrid models of instruction are the way of the future. Schools should aim to include some amount of in-person contact with distance learning. Most school systems will not return to 5 days a week in the school house, so they must take what they’ve learned over the past two months and create a new model for school. What exactly this looks like will depend greatly on the different municipalities but it must include community feedback and an understanding of what resources your system and communities already have available. 

Get community feedback

Regardless of one’s approach, systems must gather community feedback before moving forward on any plans. Systems must remember that many families will miss the online experience because they don’t have reliable internet access, don’t have smartphones, and some parents are still working on the front lines as grocery employees or healthcare workers, and taking care of their families. Systems should aim for digital outreach in the form of surveys, but also provide the survey them in multiple languages. Lastly, the online outreach should be accompanied by as many phone calls as possible to gather a wide array of feedback from different stakeholders.

Infrastructure Broadband access

From a state and federal standpoint, your representatives MUST push and advocate for broadband internet access as a Constitutional right. At the very least they should incorporate it into the next infrastructure bill that comes up for debate. Hint: gas prices are at an all time low – raise the gas tax for the first time since October 1, 1993, and tie it to inflation, so it can be a more reliable source of revenue for the federal government.

How do you contact your representatives? Well, first try calling Congress at: 202-224-3121 and ask for your representative’s office. Further, you can cast an even wider net by visiting Commoncause.org, and use your home address to find all of your community, state, and federal representatives, and how to contact them. 

Shift to the all-year school calendar

Whether the foundations of summer break came about because of our previously majority agrarian society or if that is just a myth, it is past time to get rid of the summer break and move to a model that more closely resembles the trimester, or extended school year, model. Why are we past due for this calendar change? Well, there is loads of research showing the awful impact it has on students most at risk – students of low socioeconomic means, and especially our students of color across the nation. 

David M. Quinn and Morgan Polikoff of the Brookings Institute recently wrote about summer slide and what we can do about it – noting a metanalysis of education research that stated the clear and detrimental impacts of summer break. Their findings are as follows: 

• on average, students’ achievement scores declined over summer vacation by one month’s worth of school-year learning
• students experienced a more dramatic decline for math than reading
• the extent of loss was larger at higher grade levels
• income-based reading gaps grew over the summer

Moving away from the traditional summer break has a number of positive aspects to it:

• • Mitigate teacher burnout – American University’s School of Education recently published a piece about the current state of burnout in American education and, among other statistics, noted an abundance of reasons as to why teachers are leaving the profession in droves. Spreading out 180 days of instruction over the entire school year may help in preventing burn out due to sheer exhaustion.
  • Extended breaks, more often: as it stands, most school districts close for a handful of federal and state holidays like Labor Day, Memorial Day; along with holiday breaks like Thanksgiving and winter holidays toward the end of December. However, imagine the following scenario:

• First marking period: School begins on August 1, or the first Monday of August and continues for a nine-week marking period until the end of September/beginning of October.
  • • • Fall break: allow for a one week break between first and second marking period.
• Second marking period: School begins again around the second week of October, and continues largely unabated until the middle of December, thereby allowing nine weeks of instruction that leads into an extended winter holiday break.

• • • • Winter break: allow for a six week winter break between the second and third marking periods, bringing us to the beginning of February.
      • Added benefit: ski and winter resorts get an added boost from this! As our world continues to warm due to climate change, our ski resorts are suffering at a higher rate than nearly all types of recreation – providing an extended winter break could allow for outdoor winter camps to sprout up, and mitigate some of the snow days that might have occurred anyway.

• Third marking period: School begins again around the first week of February, through the first week of April. 

• • • • Spring break: allow for a two – three week break before beginning again at the end of April.

• Fourth marking period: School begins again around the first week of May, continuing until the end of June, closing out the school year. 

• • • Summer break: allow for a four week summer reprieve to allow for teacher transfers, professional development, and summer enrichment opportunities.