Are We Out of Snow Days?

After Hastings Public Schools called its fourth snow day of the school year on February 16, many students began to wonder how many snow days the school district has left and what would happen if the district uses more snow days than how many are built into the calendar. 

Having four snow days in one school year is more than HPS typically has per year, but Trent Kelly, the Hastings Public Schools Director of Technology and Operations, remembers a school year a few years ago that had a similar amount of snow days and didn’t extend the school year.

“I’m gonna say a few years back, I remember we did have probably this many snow days, and we didn’t run into any trouble with that,” Kelly said. 

Although HPS has never had to extend the school year while the current administrators have been with the district, there are a few options the district would have to make up the required amount of hours, including extending the end of the school year by a few days, adding a few minutes to the end of each school day, or going to school during one of the district’s spring breaks. If the district did have to make up school hours, a survey about how to make up the time would be sent out to students, parents, and staff members to see how the district as a whole wants to approach making up the extra hours.

“We don’t like to cancel. It’s better if we don’t have to use them…, and we do build them in because trying to change a calendar later in the year, canceling vacation days, or extending the school year messes with graduation, so we want to avoid that if at all possible,” HPS Superintendent Jeff Schneider said.

Each school level has a different amount of hours they are required to be in school, so the amount of snow days built into the calendar varies from school to school. The time requirements for different schools are measured in hours instead of full school days, so the number of snow days each school has is typically in between two numbers. The high school is the school with the largest time requirement in the district besides preschool, with around six snow days built into the calendar and two snow days left. The middle school and elementary schools have smaller time requirements than the high school with seven to eight snow days built-in and three to four days left at the middle school level and nine to ten snow days built-in and five to six days left for the elementary schools. 

“…But we definitely have enough hours right now. We could probably have a few more snow days and still be okay, besides preschool,” Kelly said.

When deciding whether or not to call a snow day, there are many things Schneider and his team take into consideration. Schneider’s main focus when making the decision is whether or not students and staff can get to school safely, but he also keeps the effects of calling a snow day in mind, such as school breakfasts and lunches that are important for some students, being canceled.

“When we cancel school, we cancel our activities. I don’t take that lightly because I know how important they are to kids and how hard they’ve worked for some of them. They might be looking forward to a certain day and to have that canceled is frustrating for those kids, so we think about that. But what I always think about is we have some students and some staff members [coming] from out on highways and things like that,” Schneider said. 

Another option to give the snow or ice more time to melt is for the district to call a late start which happened for the first time on December 8 before the full school day was canceled and for the second time on December 9. A few district administrators talked to the Board of Education two to three years ago about potentially using late starts, but this year is the first year the district has called a late start.

“I think if the circumstances are right, we will now use it. That was kind of the first time and it went okay… And again, the great thing about the late starts, [is] we still get to have the lunch program. We still get to have school activities after school. So we will absolutely look at that in the future,” Schneider said.

The decision of whether or not to call a snow day is very serious to the district team that makes the call, however, that doesn’t exclude them from making snow day jokes like students and many others do around the time a snow day is called. 

“If I had to pick one thing, and truly the thing that we think about the most, is [that] we don’t want somebody to get hurt. That is our biggest concern. I mean, you know, we joke about snow days too because I get a lot of opinions on those days which is okay, people are good about it. But honestly, what we worry about is what if we put somebody in a dangerous situation. That’s our biggest fear,” Schneider said.