Do schools have a set amount of days they put aside in the academic year for snow and inclement weather days?

25 comments

1. Mine did. If we didn’t have snow, we got a day off, if it did, it was just a normal day.

2. My high school had dedicated makeup days that would otherwise be a mid-semester holiday, used if a certain threshold of missed days occured.

   The colleges I attended just had a blanket statement that if X classes days are missed, class days are to be added at some point.

3. IME they just add however many days were missed for weather to the end of the semester or year.

4. In areas where it is likely, yes. A couple days are set aside.

5. In Virginia, it was about 3 days. There was a year we went over and they added time to the end of the day. On years where snow didn’t show up, we ended the school year early.

6. In Michigan the state decides the amount of snow days that districts can use before the school year is extended into Summer break. Today it’s 6 “forgiveness days”.

   If the Winter is bad enough, the state will often provide more flexibly. Pretty easy legislation to pass. Happened a few times when I was in school

7. I live near St Louis & all the schools around here do so.

8. In Texas we did yes. We rarely used them and it gave us a couple 3 day weekends in the spring

9. Most do. When I was in middle school, we had a particularly brutal string of cold days that put us over their allotted snow days. We ended up having to extend the school year by three days to make up for it

10. Here in New England absolutely.

    It is set by each individual school district but the state sets a minimum number of school days required.

    One really cool thing is that our district specifically said they would still have snow days if the weather was good for playing in the snow. This is important because after Covid they can do 100% remote learning. But they will still have full days off. If the weather is sleet and ice and miserable they’ll do remote learning so as not to burn a day. The superintendent literally said “snow days are a critical part of a child’s school experience in New England.” I appreciated that.

11. Days put aside for inclement weather..?

    *laughs in Californian*

    In all seriousness though, yes, in states where it is likely I think there are days set aside. In other states I think they take days off of long weekends and so on (that’s what they do here in years when the smoke from the fires get really bad.)

12. Yes. I believe growing up we had 5 full days set aside as snow days. This would include half-days and early-dismissals. So if we had a half day because of the snow there would be 4.5 days left.

    Most years we used all of them up. If we didn’t we lost them.

13. My local district used to always set aside 3 days. But now they no longer do that because students and staff are all expected to log in and work from home if the weather is bad.

14. In California we have it set up so he have I think like 5 days of smoke/fire day

15. Yes, in Western New York State we had 10 days allotted, but often went over. (Huge snow belt) When that happened, the days in excess were added to the end of the school year.

16. My area had 3 years straight of fires so yes we had some because of it.

17. In our school district we had a maximum of X days before the school year would have to be extended.

18. Where I teach we have several foggy day delays in the winter. School is delayed an hour or two due to thick Tule fog that makes it dangerous to drive in or operate buses. Districts do make sure we have a sufficient number of “instructional minutes” in the year to justify as many foggy days as we’re likely to need.

19. Yes. If we exceed those days, we extend the school year up to a point. If we exceed that point, we start the next school year earlier. They try to maintain time in the summer for vacations.

    However, with the advancements in online schooling thanks to COVID, we are slowly replacing “snow days” with online schooling to avoid extending the year.

20. Yes. My high school had a handful of days built in make up days.

    If we hadn’t lost any days due to snow, we’d get a random Monday off. But then, if we did lose a day somewhere, we’d go to school then to make it up.

    If it was a real bad winter and we had off more days than we had built in days (almost happened once), we’d just tack the extra days to the end of the year. So instead of the last day being Friday June 3, we’d go until Tuesday June 7th or whatever.

    ​

    At the University level…. I’m not sure… I know there were a few days where we had classes canceled due to snow &/or sub-freezing winds…. I don’t think there was any special make up for them. We didn’t lose any vacation days or go longer etc…

21. In Ohio we had 5 days. It changes based on the state and school system though.

22. It’s up to the school district, districts in areas with a lot of snow/severe weather will set aside more days than areas with less severe weather,

    I haven’t been in school for 20+ years, but IIRC The school district allowed 5 days for snow days/inclement weather, but it was unusual to have more than ~3 snow days in any given year and some years didn’t have any snow days.

    One particularly bad winter had ten (non-consecutive) snow days AND the school lost power completely for three consecutive days after a huge storm that spring, so the school year was extended a week and a half to make up for some of the lost time.

23. In my experience in Texas, they set aside 2 days.

24. We had an extra week at the end of June to make up for heavy blizzards or clogged snow routes and if windchill goes below -30

25. Here in Oregon we had a few and if it ran over they’d add it to the end of the year. But when I moved to ND temporarily I found out that because it snows every single day in the winter they just had you go to school everyday, the only exception was when it was supposed to be -40 the next day and they let us stay home