How do schools handle this?
By law schools have to be in session and ready to teach X number of days per school year.
I never really thought about it before, but being from the midwest we could count on unexpected Happy Snow Days off a few times during the winter. It was a given.
But we have to make up for them at the tail end of a school year.
But what what about states who will, normally, never even SEE snow, like Florida? Are their school year years generally shorter due to lack of Snow Days?
In other words, can semi tropical states pretty much count on being in session for X number of days, while snow prone states can count on being in session X+3 days longer?
Snow days were the happy happy days growing up in Kansas!
Observing members:
0
Composing members:
0
10 Answers
For that matter, what about the parts of the country where vast areas have been devastated by fire or hurricanes? I bet there are kids who missed months of school just because they’re either just trying to stay alive, and/or they are on the move too much.
Some schools in FL have 2 hurricane days (or severe weather days) built into the schedule.
Northeastern schools usually have 5 snow days built in. Midwest I assume is around 5 also.
Sometimes those days are used for flu closures or some other unexpected occurrence.
The need for hurricane days is much less than snow days. Snow or icy roads is basically guaranteed every year in snowy states. Cities in Florida can go years without a major hurricane.
My former school district in Wisconsin had a certain number of snow days “built in” until they added days into summer.
However, that had changed since zoom. No more snow days.
@snowberry…but you can’t predict a total disaster happening, much less 4 times a year.
As for the recent disasters, I have no doubt the schools adjusted as needed.
They tack on days at the end of the year if they need to.
Bummer. You can’t forcast how long a disaster is going to take. A week or two, or a month or two?
lived in Florida as a kid. I think I was 7 when we moved.
Most school districts have to provide 180 days of school. It can vary if they choose a longer school day. Its a formula to get X hours in per school year. Other countries do it different.
They still have a target end of year dated going in that may change based on closings. Closings are not all weather related either.
Our school district will take days from spring break if they have to, although this year and the last few years, the weather in winter hasn’t been that bad so it hasn’t been an issue. I think the year when it was Hurricane Sandy, the kids missed a few days because the school had no power. Other years, it really only closes when there’s snow forecasted or snowing, and once in a while it will be closed a few hours because of a power issue but they try to get the kids in at least half a day so they get credit for the day.
How about this conundrum? I worked at a non-public level 5 school for years, which is a school for kids that have an IEP and cannot make it in a public school setting. It is a year-round school. Now we have built-in breaks, when we get the beginning of the summer quarter and two weeks at the end, Easter break, Christmas break, etc, but particularly back in 2009 through 2010 when we had back-to-back blizzards, we had a hard time figuring out how to make up the snow days. Because we often used Medicaid billing but either way we’re funded by each County if we had students from that County, we couldn’t just have less school days than have been billed for. So we could take Sundays from the breaks, but we were having trouble finding enough days because you can’t take days that are regular school day holidays, such as MLK Day, good Friday, etc. that you’re in particular, we had to do something the last quarter where we added on 15 minutes at the beginning and at the end of the day to make up for the time we weren’t going to make up any other way. It was crazy!
Answer this question 
Composing members:
0
