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Yes. I once had a whole week off from school due to a large blizzard in the Midwest. I think this sort of thing might be less common now though with remote learning
It’s not any certain amount of snow, it’s the condition of the roads
Yep. Can’t go to school 30 cm of snow on the road.
Yea, not much you can do if the roads are too dangerous to drive on
Yes, but it has to do more with whether the busses can get kids to and from school safely rather than the amount of snow.
so somewhere it doesnt snow, like florida or texas, may have school cancelled for an inch or two of snow, but Minnesota or Wisconsin may have feet of snow before schools cancelled
Where I live it doesn’t snow/freeze often enough for investing in any mitigation measures to be worthwhile. So if the roads freeze, they usually aren’t safe to drive on and a lot of schools cancel classes. Same as any other severe weather really.
I spent a fall and winter in northeast Ohio, on the other hand, and I can assure you people were expected to go to school when it snowed.
School would almost certainly close for basically any amount of snow near me. It’s so rare where live, and we are in no way equipped to even deal with freezing temperatures.
In the Before Times, sure. It isn’t so much the snow, its the condition of the roads, how cold it is if kids are walking to school or waiting at the bus stop, stuff like that.
Now, they’ll just do a virtual day.
I’m from North Georgia. We got days where it would get cold enough to snow and stick slightly. But then the snow would melt a bit and freeze overnight into a sheet of ice. In the cities they might have most of the roads salted or cleaned. Out in the country where I lived? No chance.
So in that scenario when a decent portion of students can not safely go to school and the buses can’t get down the roads they would close for the day.
Yes, schools get canceled sometimes if the roads are in bad condition. It’s usually 2-4 days per year here.
It’s about safety, not the amount of snow on the ground.
Our weather is crazy volatile in many parts of the US. Where I live, the freeze/thaw cycle and the absurdly high winds can make weather that has just a *trace* amount of snow crazy dangerous to drive or even walk in. When my wife was young, her bus ride to and from school was over an hour and a half each direction, in a big unwieldy school bus on poorly maintained backroads. About a 1/4 of the students in her school had to travel under similar circumstances each morning.
Also, the insane winds and freezing cold can wreak havoc on our power systems, and the last thing you want is 500 kids stuck in a giant building with like 30 doors and 1000 windows and no power to keep the heat going.
Yes, snow days are a big deal for kids(if it isn’t a deadly amount of snow). But more and more people are moving to areas where it doesn’t snow (Southern California, Texas Triangle, Florida) so it’s becoming less and less culturally relevant. Plus they might start doing remote learning during school days, I think it’s the death of the “snow day” this decade.
Yes.
If the amount of snow and ice on the roads poses a danger to busses, parents dropping off their kids, teachers getting to work, or kids walking to school then schools will either close for the day or delay the opening of school until the roads are clear.
Oh yea.
But up where I am it usually has to be like over 8″ in one event for them to cancel school
It concerns road conditions. Temperature is another reason. I believe if it is below 15 f, they close in my area.
Are there places they go to school no matter the snow?
Absolutely. I live next to one of the snowiest cities — Worcester Mass.
Kids have a mile walk to school. WHen there is even just 6 inches of snow overnight and plows plow it off the road? It makes huge snowbanks and sidewalks completely unaccessible. There is no safe place for kids to walk.
The roads are more narrow because of all the snow and they can’t walk on slippery roads with cars driving 30-50 miles an hour.
Add the option of really slippery roads? You can’t have people who have to go to work crashing into busses.
Once the snow is cleared up and the sidewalks cleared (99.999 by the next morning) kids go to school. It’s the timing. You gotta make roads and sidewalks safe.
Yes, because the streets are impassable. I live in a huge, hilly city with only 35 snow plows for 84 square miles.
in the South, yes. In the North, no.
the reason is that in the South, it doesn’t get cold enough for the snow to stay as powder. It snows, the salt melts it, then overnight it refreezes back into a sheet of ice over the road.
Yes, hard to go to school if the roads aren’t safe to drive on.
One time when I was in school some kids yanked the heater core plugs on the bus fleet the night before a 10 below zero day and the busses wouldn’t start that morning. Impromptu day of. Not technically a snow day but kinda. This was in northern Wisconsin in January.
Do you live somewhere that children are forced to school no matter the weather or conditions of the roads?
In the Seattle area they’ll usually close the schools for any amount of snow. It is typically not safe to travel on a lot of the roads. It doesn’t get super cold here, so if it’s snowing, usually the temperature is right around the freezing point, which means the snow will melt and refreeze repeatedly and the streets become very slick. It’s also very hilly. And since it doesn’t snow a lot here, we don’t have enough equipment to treat all the roads quickly. Arterials get plowed and de-iced and other streets, maybe, maybe not, eventually.
Before COVID-19, yes. At this point classes are as likely to go virtual as to be canceled.
In states that don’t winterize very well (like Texas, where I’m from) the answer would probably be yes, but it has to be so so severe that the roads were unsafe to travel on.
massively depends on the regions. where I live, snow is part of life. people know how to drive on it (…mostly) & our roads are rigorously salted and plowed. school is only cancelled if it gets MUCH worse than normal.
in areas where snow is much less common, this snow-related road prep doesn’t exist, making it much more dangerous for travelers. so on the off chance that there’s snow somewhere there usually isn’t, school might be cancelled.
on a different note, schools here will occasionally close during a heat advisory. whereas schools in the south just crank up the AC and keep it trucking.
It’s not about the amount of snowfall.
It’s about how possible it is to remove said snowfall from roadways to ensure safe travel for students.
Yes. How much snow it takes to trigger that depends on where in the country you are. These things are decided at a local level. Different parts of the country have very big differences in what the typical amount of snowfall is, so those different areas also have vast differences in how well the infrastructure is prepared for snow. How many snow plows there are, how much they salt/sand the roads, how many people drive cars with AWD or 4×4, how many people have winter tires, how much people have in the way of cold weather clothing, etc. So, what amounts to a light dusting of snow that can be ignored in one location becomes a massive amount that shuts down everything in another location.
For example, where I am a snow storm will typically be a couple inches of snow. So, a snow storm that gives us less than an inch is no big deal and businesses and schools are still open. But, if we get a foot of snow things shut down. Further north, it might take several feet and further south even just a dusting is worth closing. The decision is made on a day-to-day basis at a local level so it’s not like we just have a rule that X amount of snow means closed schools.
Most students take a school bus and under certain hazardous weather conditions that make it unsafe to drive, there’s a snow day. This could be due to the height of the snow, icy conditions, wind blowing and causing high snow drifts, and it’s also dependent on the local infrastructure and availability of plows.
In the past, this would cancel school for the day and kids stayed home and played in the snow, and the day would be made up later in the school year. Today, a lot of schools will have an elearning day where students don’t go to the physical school but will do assignments on an elearning platform.
There are also 2 hour delays where the driving conditions will improve in a couple hours to be safe. Foggy conditions or subzero temps will often cause 2 hour delays. This time isn’t made up.
Here in New Mexico, it’s not the snow as much as ice on the roads. We cannot drive on icy roads. So they close things down. It’s awesome. I even get “snow days” working from home.
The local government makes that call. There is no automatic amount needed to call off school. In my locale, we aren’t used to snow and have many rural roads. It’s common for school to be cancelled from the threat of a large storm.
Yes, but those missed days are made up at the end of the school year. I remember one year our summer break started 2 weeks later than normal because we’d had lots of snow days that year.
Oh, but I’ll never forget the excitement as a kid – watching the evening weather report with my parents, watching the snow pile up outside, hoping, praying for a snow day miracle. Or having mom wake you up saying, no school today – snow day. It was a gift from heaven.
Wait until you find out that sometimes students get send home early if it starts snowing heavily.
Snow days seem to be rarer than they were when I was a kid now though. Now they seem to try and do delays, so instead of school starting at 7:30 it’ll start at 9 or 10 to give the plows time to clear the roads up. I think in elementary school we only had 2 or 3 delays and we’d have sometimes as many as 8 snow days per year. Now delays seem to be pretty common.
Areas that don’t get snow often aren’t as prepared to handle those conditions so when roads become unsafe they close schools among other things to not make people have to drive in unsafe conditions.
It’s really based on the road conditions. I grew up in an area where there were 2 years, 2008-2009 and 2013 – 2014, that we were out for months. In 2008 we got a bad snow storm in December, day of the start of winter break. Then we got weekly snow storms till February. We were out of school from Decmeber to early March 2009. In 2013 we got slammed by a snow storm early December and didn’t really go back until late March, again due to almost weekly snow storms. Now that I’m adult I still get paid snow days, which is awesome. We miss only a handful of days but it’s typically more so due to ice than snow. Longest I’ve missed for snow at my job was 2 consective weeks. We had an ice storm, followed by a snowstorm, followed by another snowstorm. All within a week. Then it took about a week for things to thaw out due to a deep freeze. Although I also did get paid for a week back in December but that was because of the tornados that passed through the area on Decmeber 10. We didn’t have internet or phone service during that time.
Yes. Snow can be very dangerous to drive on in large amounts. Nobody wants to kill a bus full of kids.
It’s not just snow, but temperatures and road conditions. This year in my area the temperature was -20C for multiple days. Despite drivable road conditions, school was canceled because we didn’t want students waiting for transportation in that weather.
Accumulation of snow is a factor, if it gets to a point where transportation can not safely pick up all students. Many schools have alternate snow route that use roads that are prioritized for snow removal. However, that does mean families will need to get students to designated pick up points.
It isn’t just schools, but government offices as well. My state’s government has a hazardous travel policy, so workers can choose to stay home if they don’t think they can make it to the office safely. Which also includes floods. A couple times our governor has issued a “do not report” order to non-essential state employees during or after a natural disaster, ordering them to stay home regardless of their ability to reach the office. Both instances are so traffic on roads is lessened so transportation and emergency services can focus on clearing roads and responding to emergency calls, rather than pulling more people out of a ditch.
It’s more about the road conditions and whether or not it’s safe to be driven on, my school district was one of the few that would unfortunately still be opened or half day while the rest would either do half or close
Depends on the amount of snow and where you are. My brother in law is in the Atlanta area and they close down the whole town of there is even a sprinkle. Makes sense though because they don’t have anything to deal with snow since they rarely get it. I’m in nyc area. We have to have a good bit of snow and it has to be fresh where there wasn’t time for the plows to clean the streets.
We can have 1-3 snow days a year. The school has a certain amount of days put aside for snow days or other events that close schools. If the kids don’t use them, they get to go on summer vacation earlier and if they use too many then they extend school. Kids have to go to school a certain amount of days a year regardless.
Yes. As to how much is dependent on the area
not about the amount of snow *necessarily,* it’s about how safe the roads are. they’d rather make up a day over spring break or in june than put kids in danger
Depends on the region. It doesn’t snow often in Tennessee so we it’s not worth buying all the equipment to deal with it. So when it snows even half and inch, everything closes for the day.
We do have snow days. But the decision is more about road conditions and temperature than the snow itself.
It’s usually because of black ice not snow.