Snow days: you love them or you hate them. For some students and faculty, a snow day is seen as a day to sleep in, catch up on work, watch some television, and relax when you need it most. For others, a snow day is seen as a nuisance, leading to even more work and the annoying postponement of certain activities and assignments that throws off one’s schedule.
Planning around snow days can be a tedious and irritating task. “Snow days for me generally are disruptive and [make life harder]. Many events, appointments and meetings need to be re-scheduled, and this takes a big chunk of my time. Because we schedule things so tightly at Fieldston, it’s a challenge to move things forward,” Mr. Cairo explained.
On the other hand, a lot of students love snow days. Jack Makari (V) told us what he likes to do on his average snow day, saying, “I usually just catch up or go ahead in work… I always have plenty to do.” Myles Cameron (V) agreed, claiming, “I usually try to balance my time between doing work and watching Netflix… But it’s nice to have time to catch up on work.” Although snow days are often used for work, Makari agrees that “[snow days] are de-stressors because [he] can plan [his] day knowing that [he doesn’t] have to stay up late.”
With the seemingly never-ending snow supply and polar vortices hitting our area this year, school has been cancelled a whopping six times. Evidently, these snow days come at a price; the school has decided to add three days back into our schedule. Instead of having a half-day for parent-teacher conferences and a full day off to follow, we will have two full days of school. In addition, the Tuesday of President’s Day Weekend–which we usually have off–has been added to the school schedule.
“The decision was made by Dr. Fernandez in consultation with the principals. My sense is that Dr. Fernandez believes that it is important to our mission to preserve instructional time. When the snow days accumulate in a given year, at some point the school needs to consider recovering some of those days,” Mr. Cairo said. “But I don’t know what that magic number is.” Well, perhaps it’s six.
