Every student and staff member has experienced waking up to a fresh sheet of snow on the ground, hoping school was called off, only to look at their phone and realize, no, school is still on.
As a student, specifically one who drives to school, I absolutely dread it when we get snow and don’t have a snow day, because I just know the parking lot is going to be chaos. For some reason, our school (and basically everywhere) experiences a strange phenomenon when it snows: everyone in the parking lot just forgets how to drive. No matter how long they have been driving for, they act as if they have never sat behind the wheel or, better yet, never seen snow.
Because I have experienced this firsthand for the past two years, I have come up with a solution that I think will make students and staff happy. Instead of letting the district administration decide when to call a snow day, we leave that decision to SHS students and staff.
I personally believe that this is a brilliant idea and know for a fact that many others will agree with me. While our district administration does a lot for the high school, not many of them have had to experience the parking lot on a snowy Monday morning when it is not plowed and the parking spot lines are not visible.
To back up my solution, I am going to give 3 reasons why this plan would be perfect for SHS and the rest of the Stoughton Area School District.
Reason #1: SHS students and staff have a lot more experience dealing with snow days than the district does. In my opinion, the only people who should be deciding on snow days are the ones who actually have to deal with the consequences of not having one, and those people are SHS staff and students. Not only are most drivers at SHS fairly new and inexperienced when it comes to driving in the snow, but they are also teenagers, and teenagers are stupid. What I mean when I say teenagers are stupid is that they are often very overconfident in their driving skills and believe that they can do more than they actually can. Every time it snows this school year, at least one person ends up in a ditch on the way to school or slides out in the parking lot; it’s just a fact. However, this problem could be easily solved with my solution.
Reason #2: The district does not have to deal with the aftermath of not having a snow day. The atmosphere at the school shifts whenever a snow day isn’t called, and everyone either wants one or was expecting one. No one(students and staff) wants to be there, and everyone is miserable. This makes for a not-so-great learning environment because who actually wants to be at school when there is snow on the ground (newsflash: not a single person)? As someone who has personally been a victim of the post-no-snow-day attitude, I can say with confidence that I learn nothing. Everything goes in one ear and out the other. So basically, what I’m saying is let students and staff decide when to have snow days, because when a snow day isn’t called, the same amount of learning is accomplished as if we did have one (AKA nothing).
Reason #3: Students (and possibly teachers) would make sure we use ALL of our snow days. One thing that is commonly talked about in the halls of SHS in the spring is how we never end up using all of the snow days that are built into the calendar. Personally, I believe that this is crazy because if we have built-in days off, why are we not using all of them? Anyways, I know for a fact that if SHS students and staff were able to decide on snow days, we would be left with zero days, which, honestly, is the way to do it. If we are not going to get the days back, meaning we take days away at the end of the year, why would we not use all of the snow days we have? If left up to students and staff, these days would be used properly to account for snow, or maybe even give everyone a day off in the spring when it is 70 degrees and sunny out for the first time in five months…
Despite all the complaining that I have done above, I do truly appreciate everything that the district office does for SHS, and its students and staff members; however, I just really think it is in everyone’s best interest for us to decide on snow days and not district admin. With that being said, I am more than happy to discuss this conversation further with our superintendent and other school administrators, so feel free to hit me up.
