Add one more item to the list of things forever changed by the pandemic; the Snow Day. Who doesn’t remember waking up early to see if snow was falling, racing to the TV or radio and waiting to hear the sweetest words a school age kid can hear: “School is Cancelled, We are Using a Snow Day”.
For kids, a snow day meant heading out and hanging out with friends, sledding on the probably 1-2 inches of powder that constitute a Greenville snow and forgetting the homework you may or may not have done. A snow day was a free day and was a big part of childhood memories.
As a parent, the snow day was a bit more problematic. If parents worked, arrangement for a sitter needed to be hastily made or you hoped you had an understanding boss. If the parents were home, the snow day meant that your plans for the day just got turned upside down. Kids would need to be fed and lots of wet snow covered laundry would quickly pile up.
The Greenville snow storm of January 1982
This week, Greenville County Schools released their 2021-2022 schedule and have made no accommodations for Snow Days. The advent of e-Learning brought on by the Covid-19 pandemic has given teachers the ability to conduct classes in person and virtually. For students, a prediction of wintry weather is no longer a free pass to skip homework.
I asked Greenville School spokesman, Tim Waller, about Snow Days a few weeks back. Here’s his reply to the question of Is the Snow Day Dead?
Please don’t shoot the messenger, but yes, snow days are a thing of the past. Thanks to Google Classroom and other educational platforms, and the fact that all Greenville County School students have Chromebooks, we now have the ability to conduct online classes even if there’s a foot of snow on the ground. An exception to this might be if a storm knocks out electricity or internet service to large numbers of students and teachers. In that case, classes will resume as soon as everything is back on.
The Covid-19 pandemic has brought a lot of changes to the world and we have lost a lot. In the grand scheme of things, the loss of the Snow Day is trivial but it does seem like a bit of our childhoods has drifted further away. As a southerner, snow predictions will always get me excited but I hate to see kids miss out on the excitement of hearing: No School Today, It’s a Snow Day!
