Snow days are fun…until they’re not

In case you missed the announcement over the weekend, ANCS will be holding a regular day of school on Monday, March 19 (a day previously scheduled as a teacher/staff professional learning and work day) to recoup some of the instructional time missed due to inclement weather this school year.  Given that few issues stir up as much passion among parents, students, and teachers as snow days, I thought I’d dedicated some blog space this week to addressing some questions and concerns on the subject that have come up in the past week or two.

First, as I hope you know, ANCS’s policy regarding closure due to inclement weather is to follow the decision of the Atlanta Public Schools.  This policy is in place because (1) APS has access to a much more comprehensive meteorological modeling network through its partnership with the city, state, and other local districts than we do as a small charter operation, and (2) with many families and staff having students enrolled at both ANCS and another APS school, if unsafe travel is predicted, we try to be coordinated on our closures.  So if APS closes school because of predictions of snow, ice, etc., then ANCS will be closed as well.  But in the aftermath of inclement weather’s arrival, as executive director, I have discretion as to whether we’ll continue to be closed or decide to re-open.  For example, in the fall, a couple of days after Hurricane Irma passed through Atlanta, APS remained closed because several of its schools were without power and many of its staff living outside Atlanta still faced difficult travel to school.  However, ANCS never really lost power during the storm, so we were prepared to serve meals to students, and despite some staff members–myself included–being without power at home, most of us could manage to safely (if not conveniently) make it to school to teach students and provide them a safe, dry school building.  Similarly, just over a week ago, APS stayed closed for a third day because many of their staff members were having difficulty traveling from outside the city center to get to schools resulting in understaffed schools.  Yet with the roads relatively clear around ANCS and a sense that most of our teachers and staff could get to our campuses, we decided to open, urging people to travel slowly and safely, so that we could be back in session for students.

In following APS’s decisions to close when potentially dangerous weather is predicted, sometimes that weather turns out to not be so bad at all, such as the forecast of possibly icy conditions back on January 8th that led to closure of school the night before.  While it was a rainy, dreary Monday (and that was before UGA’s heartbreaking loss), it would have been fine to hold school that day.  But I understand the desire to deal cautiously.  Twice in my career as an educator have I worked in schools closed for a full week due to a single weather event–once in Boston when there was 36 inches of snow and once here in Atlanta where there was about 3 inches of snow.  The difference, of course, is that there’s much less of a mechanism to clear travel paths on a large scale here in Atlanta, and so, school may be closed based on predictions of significantly less accumulation here than elsewhere in the country.  I think we all realize this difference, but nonetheless, I did hear some grumbles wondering why we were closed for a “rain day”.

Finally, there’s been much talk lately about how missed class time might be made up.  While we do have some flexibility in addressing missed school days (state law allows for up to four days to be “forgiven”), we do want to insure we’re providing students as much learning time as possible, so we have looked to gain some of this time back.  But we also want to do it in a meaningful way, trying to avoid just adding the equivalent number of minutes to the end of school days for months or scheduling school over a holiday break when we expect many students will be out–thus, why we landed on having a full, regular school day on March 19th.  And while trying to build in weather make up days in advance might be helpful, it is difficult to do completely in isolation of APS when we try to mirror as much as possible the district’s major holiday breaks.  

There’s no perfect solution to dealing with the challenges the weather can sometimes throw at schools, but, thankfully, in my 11 years at ANCS, there’ve only been two in which we’ve missed more than four days of school.  Hoping we won’t have another one for a good, long while :)