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A school board in South Carolina has launched a pilot program to get rid of snow days and instead have students work from home when the weather turns treacherous. Beyond depriving schoolkids of the joys of weather-enforced truancy, the plan will exacerbate the region's digital divide for student who don't have internet access at home.
Anderson County School District Five will be the first region to participate in the pilot program this upcoming school year. In the past, Anderson County had makeup days tacked on to the end of the school year in lieu of days missed due to bad weather, but most kids ended up just skipping them, according to a local news report.
Students from grades 3 through 12 in the school board are already given Chromebooks to use at home, so in the event of a snow day or other inclement weather that causes a shutdown, kids will be expected to log on from home, communicate with teachers, and complete assignments.
Source: MotherBoard
(Score: 5, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday August 04 2018, @06:20PM (14 children)
Living in this region of the US. They are ridiculous with the 'snow days'. I grew up in an area that would get 6+ inches of snow at least 3-6 times a year. We were ready for it. It is going to snow sometimes. You *might* get 1 or 2 days off a year.
In this southern area it basically snows and is gone within a day MAYBE two. I am talking 1-2 inches here MAYBE once or twice a year. They make it like it is the second coming and Armageddon is upon us. You just do not drive and you are pretty good. Instead we have people emptying the shelves like a hurricane is rolling in and the next food shipment is in 6 months. Now the schools take it to the next level. In my district they canceled school 8 times this year. It snowed one of those times. Here is an idea. Do like the rest of the country. Get up at 4AM on a night where it may snow and make your decision. You then work with the local news stations to tell them. Instead of 'no school tomorrow because it might snow'.
So instead of the school admin DOING their job. They are going to crack out millions of dollars in what amount to showoff blingy toys. These dingalings have schools where the teachers are buying their own markers, chalk, and other supplies. If you can not even get the basics for a school correct, putting computers in the mix is not going to help one bit. On top of that it will make your budget problems much worse.
My bet is the program crashes and burns. Then leaves a smoking hole in their budget.
(Score: 1, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday August 04 2018, @09:57PM (1 child)
> You just do not drive and you are pretty good.
The one closure, when there was snow, could be justified. In areas where drivers aren't accustomed to snow (Atlanta for example), it makes sense not to run the school buses when there's even a little snow. I'm assuming they have buses.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday August 05 2018, @09:29PM
Most of the south does not salt or sand, and if you're in the hills or mountains, they won't let school buses drive in unsafe conditions. Can't explain the grocery store behavior when someone just mentions the word snow....
(Score: 5, Interesting) by sjames on Saturday August 04 2018, @11:18PM (9 children)
A funny thing about snow days though. If it's mild, kids miss a day at most. If it's more severe, they'll have quite a time using their chromebooks after trees have taken out the power and cable broadband.
Perhaps what is really needed is for school officials to get over themselves and quit wasting so much time during the existig school year.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday August 04 2018, @11:36PM (8 children)
> after trees have taken out the power and cable broadband
This story is about South Carolina.
(Score: 2) by The Mighty Buzzard on Saturday August 04 2018, @11:40PM (5 children)
There's some pretty damned tall trees in SC. An 80' pine wasn't remotely rare around the Charleston suburbs when I lived there.
My rights don't end where your fear begins.
(Score: 3, Interesting) by requerdanos on Sunday August 05 2018, @12:29AM (4 children)
And what happens is that the trees grow lots of nice branches. When ice comes, the ice freezes to the tree's branches, making them much, much heavier. The tree, or large, frozen-together portions of it, then fall, taking out the power, cable, broadband, whatever's on the nearby utility poles.
This has happened to me in both North and South Carolina. The less dense the population in your area, the slower they come to repair it.
(Score: 2) by The Mighty Buzzard on Sunday August 05 2018, @02:37AM (3 children)
Well aware of this. I was in Charleston when Hugo came through, so I got intimately acquainted with what kind of trees were around. They're much easier to inspect when they're laying sideways on your neighbor's house. GP appeared to be insinuating that there weren't any respectable trees to speak of in SC, which would be horribly incorrect.
Oklahoma also gets really nasty ice storms every five years or so and I lived in a little podunk town that was pretty low on the utility company's priority list. This is where having a wood burning stove in your shop building comes in really, really handy.
My rights don't end where your fear begins.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday August 05 2018, @01:49PM (2 children)
I was insinuating that they don't have any respectable snowfall—something you insinuated in another comment.
(Score: 2) by requerdanos on Sunday August 05 2018, @07:02PM (1 child)
The snowfall, light sometimes, heavy others, does in fact not get much respect from snow snobs.
I first held a snow shovel at age 36 because I was visiting a friend in Chicago. This is a win. Game, set, and match.
(Score: 2) by The Mighty Buzzard on Monday August 06 2018, @10:53AM
That is indeed a win. Fuck Beta^WSnow!
My rights don't end where your fear begins.
(Score: 2) by sjames on Monday August 06 2018, @12:14AM
And my post was due to long experience living in Georgia (one state to the south for the geographically challenged). We either get light snow that's gone in a day or we get about a weeks worth of ice accompanied by downed trees and associated power loss.
The former isn't enough disruption to the school year to fret over (since it happens less than once a year) and the latter, as I pointed out, will see many students UNABLE to log in from home (and a few more who will SAY they were unable).
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday August 06 2018, @12:58PM
Are you suggesting SC doesn't have trees or above ground power lines?
Because I can assure you they have a lot of both.
(Score: 1, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday August 05 2018, @05:11AM
That's the thing now isn't it? In areas that typically get enough snow for this to be a possible problem, they tend to have snow plows and the like to clear things up in order to get back to classes promptly. Perhaps there's a significant blizzard from time to time that causes snow days, but typically it's a non-issue. You might start a bit late, but that's it.
There are places like Seattle where it rarely snows and when it does snow you have to deal with both the hills and unknown type of snow, but typically even here it's rare to have enough snow that it's an issue. There are extra days added to the schedule to account for that. And in rare cases the schedule of the year can be extended to meet the required days of instruction.
Let the kids have a day or two to enjoy the snow, it's not like they're going to be kids forever and if this even comes up, they probably don't have many chances to enjoy snow.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday August 06 2018, @02:54PM
Even in the central midwest that happens. We used to have a rule that if the rural school district closes our company would close that day. This would be both for safety and so our parent-employees wouldn't have to scramble to look for babysitters. The district rule was strictly on the opinion whether it was safe to have the buses on the streets and usually required either significant icing and/or blizzard-level snow that the plows couldn't keep up with. And that might result in a single day's loss ever other year. Now, if the temperature approaches 0 Farenheit they'll close because they're worried that kids might not have appropriate clothing to wait for the buses to arrive / what if a bus breaks down? One year we had four or so days like that plus two or three days where it actually wasn't safe to drive. (In my day, that was the parents' responsibility, and the school would help out poverty cases where they literally could not afford heavy clothes. But that was more Northerly than where I am now and you could rely on sub-zero temps for part of Winter). Now our company's rule is that is the post office ceases mail delivery or if a combination of hospitals cease all non-emergency activities and largest employer in town closes doors. It has to be worse than just the schools close down.