Opinion: Just Give the Kids a Snow Day, Don’t Make Them Open a Laptop

This has nothing to do with sports, but we have a lot of parents who read the site and likely had a shitty Monday.

Why? Well, if you’re like me, you were probably stuck at home with your kid, who got the day off despite a snowfall that wasn’t exactly the Blizzard of ’96. And chances are you yourself did not get a freebie, so you probably had to juggle your own work responsibilities while handling feral youths at the same time.

In my case, that was a 5-year-old daughter, who is in Kindergarten. She has a Chromebook and her class held a 10 a.m. meeting before she was assigned a few tasks to complete. Nothing crazy, but unless you have a child prodigy, the average 5-year-old is probably still learning how to use a laptop, so I had to sit there with her for about 90 minutes guiding her through activities before, mercifully, a stay-at-home neighbor mom took her out in the snow to play with her children.

Luckily for us, my job is unimportant, so I was able to dip for a moment. The Eagles won, here are some stats, go Birds! Blogging is non-essential job, so we can shove off forever and no one would notice.

But I kept thinking to myself – what happens if you work a real job? What happens if you actually have to drive somewhere to do something important, like run the water treatment plant, or stock the grocery store shelves, or plow the roads? Your kid is now at home and has tasks to complete. If they’re old enough to be unsupervised, then great. But if not, your options are what? Take a personal day? Drop the kid off at the grandparents’ house? Call a neighbor? It’s one thing if you can plop them in front of the TV and check in every so often, but now schools are asking parents to do a portion of the instructing during these “asynchronous virtual instruction” days.

That’s one thing that’s really annoying, the assumption that parents either work from home, or they’re hybrid, or they can just drop everything they’re doing at a moment’s notice. It’s disrespectful to the parents who don’t have the luxury of flexibility or a reliable family network, and would reasonably expect that a public school district located in the northeastern United States can handle an inch or two of snow.

The other thing, which is more important, is this –

Can’t we just give the kids off? Why does a five-year-old have to open a laptop on a snow day? She’s got the rest of her life to stare at a screen and wither both spiritually and physically (only half joking). Snow days are few and far between, and they should be fun. Let them run around and throw snowballs at each other, build a fort, drink hot chocolate, and binge trash TV. Let them get all sugared up and do the fun stuff we did when we were kids, before phones and computers, back when we had to watch the lower third crawl on Channel 69 News at 6 a.m. to see if that two-hour delay was coming. You can never replicate the excitement of seeing BOYERTOWN AREA SCHOOL DISTRICT appear on the screen, knowing that the greatest of days had just arrived.

This feels like some bullshit lingering COVID development that should go back to 2020 and stay there forever. Maybe it made sense then, but it doesn’t now. And listen, if you had kids in school during the pandemic, all due respect. I had no idea it was that bad.

Finally, if you listen to the scientists, global warming is killing the polar ice caps and soon there won’t be any snow at all. So we might as well let our kids enjoy it while they can. Serenity now!

disclaimer: I love all teachers and blame this wretchedness on the administrators

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