(This week’s civic education and engagement column from Danville’s The Republican newspaper.)
Local school superintendents are accustomed to making all sorts of difficult decisions in the course of their jobs. You might be surprised at which decision is the one most consider to be the toughest of all: whether they should declare a snow day.
That decision belongs to the superintendent alone, and whether they call a snow day or expect kids to attend, they know they’ll be quickly buried. Not by snow, but in an avalanche of angry phone calls, emails, and social media posts questioning their sanity, their competence, and whether they genuinely care about kids. Either choice will provoke about the same uproar.
Parents who push for more snow days generally do so for one of two reasons. The first is simple nostalgia: they remember how much fun they had when their own schools shut down because of snow, and they want their kids to have the same experiences. The second is a concern for safety. Parents don’t want their kids waiting at a chilly bus stop or driving down icy roads.
Most people who express anger when superintendents don’t declare snow days assume the reason is financial: “All they care about is getting their money!” They know that Hoosier schools are required to provide a minimum of 180 days of classroom instruction, so they assume cancelling school results a loss of funds for that day.
Nothing could be further from the truth. Snow days have zero effect on a school district’s funding or finances. Essentially, school districts receive one-twelfth of the per-student state funding amount every month. Whether a school district takes zero snow days or ten in the course of a year has zero impact on how much money they’ll receive. If a district falls below the 180-day minimum because of snow days, they’re expected to make them up by adding days in May or June. The state sometimes waives that limit when especially brutal winters lead to large numbers of snow days.
Some residents think the snow day decision involves some sort of nefarious conspiracy, because all six districts seem to make their decision at the same time. Well, it’s true! Long before most parents are awake, school administrators are out driving local roads to get a sense of the actual conditions (instead of relying upon social media hysteria). Then they gather for a conference call with their fellow superintendents, compare what they’ve seen, and discuss what they plan to do.
Conditions often vary dramatically between districts. For example, Plainfield tends to call fewer snow days and two-hour delays than the districts farther to the west and northwest. That’s not because the superintendent is a Grinch or hates sledding – it’s because the district is physically smaller, and state and town road crews do an extraordinary job of clearing the roads school buses use. Neighboring Mill Creek district is several times larger and far more rural. It’s a lot tougher to keep all those wide-open county roads free of drifts and ice.
If superintendents don’t face any penalties for calling snow days, why are they so reluctant to do so? The first reason is that snow days and two-hour delays are extremely disruptive to the classroom process, especially at the middle and high school level. Teachers have detailed lesson plans mapped out over the year, and the loss of even a single day can force major rescheduling.
But the biggest reason school leaders think twice about snow days is they know something most Hendricks County families don’t: a substantial percentage of local households are headed by a single parent. Many of those parents work at jobs that don’t have flexible or forgiving schedules. Having to skip a day of work because of a snow day typically means the loss of that day’s pay. Those parents are faced with a choice none of us wants to make: either give up a fifth of the family’s weekly income, or leave a small child home alone. Not everyone has nearby relatives or trusted neighbors who can step in to help.
One more point: many parents support more two-hour delays as an alternative to snow days – especially on the chilliest mornings – but winter temperatures generally don’t moderate until midday. That means a bus stop that’s chilly at 7:30 will probably be just as cold at 9:30, and again, the delay could force a parent to miss work or leave the child alone at home.