On the evening of February 22nd, as New York City braced for its second blizzard of the season, Mayor Mamdani posted a video to Instagram in which he made a FaceTime call to a public school student named Victoria to announce that they would have a traditional snow day on Monday, February 23rd.
“So, I thought as the mayor, I wanted to call you and give you some news,” he told Victoria. “We’ve got a full snow day tomorrow. No online school, no remote learning. Full classic snow day.”
Mayor Mamdani’s announcement came as a shock, given that NYC public school students have not experienced a traditional snow day since before the COVID-19 pandemic. “Finally[,] let the kids have their snow day like we did a long time ago,” read one comment on the Instagram post.
The excitement over this announcement was short-lived, however. The next day, schools were back open, even though many roads still had not been plowed and sidewalks across the city were buried under twenty inches of snow. Only 63% of students attended school on this day, and roughly 15% of teachers called out. When asked during a press conference why students couldn’t have a virtual learning day, Mayor Mamdani responded, “It was not possible to ensure that enough students had the devices they needed to effectively participate in remote learning.”
This is a familiar refrain to educators, students and parents who experienced similar challenges at the height of the pandemic almost six years ago. This issue raised questions about whether virtual learning days should remain an option in the event of inclement weather, or if students should abandon remote learning altogether, given the logistical challenges that Mayor Mamdani cited in his press conference.
Several other school districts across the country have chosen to remove snow days altogether in favor of having a day of remote school during extreme weather. The decision to force remote learning onto students has been rightfully controversial, and the remote days have already faced numerous challenges.
Unsurprisingly, having one million students using the internet for calls during a winter storm doesn’t always work out, and it should hardly be an expectation that the internet would run smoothly for all teachers and students. When NYC first tested going remote during a snow day in February of 2024, there were widespread technical problems that frustrated parents and teachers alike. Parents rightfully argued against having to return to all the challenges of remote learning that they were forced to deal with during the pandemic. In addition, expecting students to have a device available at home to log onto their classes remotely creates additional unnecessary issues that could be solved by not relying on the internet for education. Why create the burden of distributing laptops to every student in the school district if schools could simply give the students the day off? And if the district doesn’t have the means to do this, it exposes inequalities in access to technology or reliable internet for some families.
Because of these technical problems, as well as the difficulty of holding every student accountable to logging onto their classes, attendance rates for these remote days are often shockingly low. In Pittsburgh, attendance dropped as low as 66% when they went remote. How is any kind of meaningful instruction supposed to take place when one third of the students don’t show up, and when some students aren’t accustomed to remote learning? Many elementary school students don’t yet know how to use a computer for school, let alone learn anything meaningful, while miles away from their teachers. Every aspect of remote learning during COVID suffered; students were unmotivated, disorganized, and scored lower on standardized tests.
School districts have justified going remote by saying that it provides consistency to students and allows schools to fulfill a 180-day school year without adding days to the end of the year. But many argue that these remote days should hardly count as a full, proper day of instruction because they don’t “adequately meet students’ needs,” and most school districts get along just fine adding one or two days of school in June.
So if remote learning is inferior, it seems unnecessary to return to such an imperfect form of education for even a day if students could instead have the day off to enjoy their childhoods. Traditional snow days where students weren’t held accountable for completing their work outside of school offered a reprieve from the monotonous school weeks. It gave students something to be excited about. Knowing that you’ll have to sit through Zoom meetings stifles that childish spirit and desire to have fun and replaces it with the sad confinement of spending hours inside on a computer. A snowstorm gives a community a reason to drop their hard work and gather outside to enjoy something that we don’t get enough of. Snow days are the heart of winter for any child, and killing them with computers is only reflective of the increasingly isolated world that we live in. Bring back childhoods—bring back snow days.
