When winter weather causes the cancellation of school days, the education of every child suffers. No compensatory make-up of school days or minutes of instruction redeems the loss of planned, continuous learning. We know this to be true. It is time for the leaders of school districts in areas that annually face school closure to due to snow and cold to give their school children a break – a winter break in the school calendar.
On January 28, 2014, WKOW, an ABC affiliate in Madison, WI, ran these data regarding Madison area school cancellations.
- School District of Beloit – 4 days cancelled, will extend year by 4 days.
- School District of Beloit-Turner – 4 days cancelled, 2 days built into calendar, considering extending half days or eliminating teacher work days.
- Cassville School District – 6 days cancelled, will make half-days full days, eliminate teacher work days, school on Good Friday, extend the school year.
- DeForest Area School District – 4 days cancelled, 3 days built into calendar, will make-up 1 day.
- Evansville Community School District – 5 days cancelled, 3 days and additional hours built into calendar, will make-up 1.5 days.
- New Lisbon School District – 5 days cancelled, 2 days will not be made up, 1 day taken from spring break, extend the school year by 2 days.
- Oregon School District – 5 days cancelled, need to make-up some days, still considering options, will make final decision in the spring.
http://m.wkow.com/w/main/story/108269442/
Since the WKOW report, each school district has cancelled school between two and four additional days.
The problem of school cancellation is not confined to Wisconsin. All northern tier states, including New England and the eastern seaboard face harsh winter weather. A Michigan report indicated that 140 of 755 school districts cancelled school more than ten days and a dozen districts cancelled school more than twenty days.
http://bridgemi.com/2014/02/snow-wars/
From the get go, it is apparent that the instructional year that some districts place on the annual school calendar contains “throw away days.” If no days of school are cancelled, children will have school on a full calendar of days, usually 180. But if school is cancelled, there are days that can be missed without the need for make-up. 178 days will do. And, there almost always are more hours of instruction scheduled within 180 days than are required. Hence, days when the start of school is delayed and/or children are dismissed early do not count as school cancellations. Actually, starts and early dismissals may be as frequent as cancelled school days.
If a school district does not have “throw away days” in its calendar, then it uses strategies for compensatory time. The easy pickings for making-up instruction are teacher work days. These are days when teachers are scheduled to do professional work at school but children are not in attendance. If teacher work days are used for make-up, children attend school on those days and the planned professional work is forfeited.
Extending school into planned vacation periods or after the planned end of school year date is the next strategy often used by school leaders. It also is the strategy most disdained by parents who have planned and often deposited money for family vacations during spring and Easter vacations and immediately after the last day of the school calendar. Student attendance on make-up days is never as great as attendance on a regularly scheduled days of school. Families that have pre-committed to vacation plans seldom renege on those plans. Regular weekend activities make Saturdays a difficult draw back to school. And, when children know that some to many of their classmates will not attend school on a make-up day, parental statements of “you should go” become less compelling.
Interestingly, holding school on days with severe inclement weather also has a downside for instruction. “My son said (his) teacher could not do plans with seven students in his period one class – so they just say for the entire block.”
http://wavy.com/2014/02/15/debate-rages-about-saturday-school-days/
A final compensatory action is to add minutes to subsequent days of school in the spring in order to meet state mandates for required hours of instruction by grade level or in subject areas. Adding minutes to the school day is an option only if the school will meet number of mandated days of instruction, usually between 170 and 180 depending upon each state’s requirements.
No matter what an observer of snow days thinks, nothing in school is simple when school is cancelled. Many instructional plans are postponed for a day or two, or three or four if a weekend connects to the cancellation. Some instructional plans cannot be reassembled – the speaker or interactive media connection cannot be rescheduled, the field trip option is lost, the school will be on vacation (ironic, eh?), or there are other school demands that take priority over the planned instruction. At a minimum, the continuity of learning is broken. And, it is this break in instruction that is the most damaging.
“Dave Marcotte and Steven Hemelt (2008) collected data on school closures from all but one school district in Maryland to estimate the impact on achievement. The percentage of students passing math assessments fell by about one-third to one-half a percentage point for each day school was closed, with the effect largest for students in lower grades. Hansen (2008) found effects in Maryland that are nearly identical to those reported by Marcotte and Hemelt, and larger, though statistically insignificant, results in Colorado. Hansen also took advantage of a different source of variation in instructional time in Minnesota. Utilizing the fact that the Minnesota Department of Education moved the date for its assessments each year for six years, Hansen estimated that the percentage of 3rd- and 5th-grade students with proficient scores on the math assessment increased by one-third to one-half of a percentage point for each additional day of schooling.
While our studies use data from different states and years, and employ somewhat different statistical methods, they yield very similar results on the value of additional instructional days for student performance. We estimate that an additional 10 days of instruction results in an increase in student performance on state math assessments of just under 0.2 standard deviations. To put that in perspective, the percentage of students passing math assessments falls by about one-third to one-half a percentage point for each day school is closed.
Other researchers have examined impacts of instructional time on learning outcomes in other states, with similar results. For example, University of Virginia researcher Sarah Hastedt has shown that closures that eliminated 10 school days reduced math and reading performance on the Virginia Standards of Learning exams by 0.2 standard deviations, the same magnitude we estimate for the neighboring state of Maryland. Economist David Sims of Brigham Young University in 2008 took advantage of a 2001 law change in Wisconsin that required all school districts in that state to start after September 1. Because some districts were affected while others were not, he was also able to provide unusually convincing evidence on the effect of changes in the number of instructional days. He found additional instruction days to be associated with increased scores in math for 4th-grade students, though not in reading.”
So, why do school continue to build traditional school calendars in the face of this annual dilemma? Does Einstein’s definition of insanity come to mind?
Give us all a break. Schedule a winter break in the school year and avoid the harshest of winter weather. What would this look like?
Begin school on the third Monday in August, typically fourteen days prior to September 1. This will allow the school calendar to complete a first semester, typically 90 school days, prior to Christmas. Too early? Many observers of US schools link the flagging performance of our children on competitive international tests to the fact that schools in the US have one of the shortest school calendars among tested nations. Assuring that children use all of the days scheduled in their school year would be a significant step in improving international test scores if up to five percent of a school year may be lost every year to school cancellations.
Schedule a winter vacation from the third Friday in December to the fourth Monday in January. This break will include traditional Christmas vacations, often one to two weeks in length.
Begin the second semester on the fourth Monday in January. The second semester will include 90 days of instruction and will conclude around the second Friday in June, depending upon the school district’s treatment of spring and Easter vacations.
This alternative will not avoid every winter storm, but it will avoid the days of the year that are typically
- the coldest – check the wind chill temps for the month of January. How many days presented wind chills of -20 degrees or colder?
- the darkest – check the research on ASD, Affective Seasonal Disorder. On how days in January did children go to school and return home from school in the dark?
- most likely to be snow days – on how many days in January did snow fall and create hazardous driving and walking conditions?
- the most expensive days of school operations – check with your local school to determine the operational costs (heating, electricity, snow plowing) of a day of school in January. Compare these costs to a day in August or a day in June. How much overtime was spent in January to make school ready for students given falling and blowing snow?
- the most difficult days of school life to reschedule – check with your local athletic director, school play and musical directors, and instrumental and choral directors. Ask them about the difficulties of rescheduling events that are postponed when school is cancelled.
Even though the data and studies indicate that academic achievement suffers as a result of cancelled days of school in January, that make-up days are poorly supported by many school parents and are poorly attended by children, and that adding minutes of instruction to subsequent school days is a numbers game not an instructional compensation, most school districts will continue to use these ineffective fixes to solve the problems caused by school cancellation.
Opponents to a winter break will complain that winter sports and arts programs will be devastated if children are not in school in January. Not so. Schools have successful histories of beginning fall sports seasons in August and continuing spring sports seasons into June and early July when school is not in session. It is very reasonable to consider winter sports seasons operating successfully in January without children in school. Schools also have successful histories of supporting drama and music programs during the summer when children are not in school.
Opponents will complain that parents will have difficulty finding child care for young children in January. But, probably not any more difficulty than they have in the summer months when children traditionally are on vacation.
Regardless of the evidence, a winter break is not the traditional way in which schools deal with winter weather. Why not? If academic achievement suffers when children experience school cancellations and school leaders use make-up days and additional instructional time to accommodate state mandates knowing that neither of these compensations is as good as continuous, planned instruction, why shouldn’t schools adopt a school calendar with a winter break. It only makes sense to stop doing what doesn’t work and begin a new practice that can work.