Comments on: Snow Days

By: Cidu Bill

Cidu Bill — Thu, 28 Feb 2008 04:35:18 +0000

Where I live it’s not the amount of snow that matters, but the traction: Our town was built on a roller coaster, and a small amount of ice can make it unsafe to run the school buses.

Friends from the midwest used to mock our frequent “snow days” — and then I visited the midwest and realized most of it’s flatter than Jeremy’s friend Hector. Well sure, it’s easy to say “our school buses run through eight inches of snow” when you don’t have to worry about making it up steep hills or stopping at the bottoms of them!

By: bAT L.

bAT L. — Thu, 28 Feb 2008 04:16:54 +0000

It has to get really, really bad in Milwaukee to cancel schools. I’ve had school in the negative double digits, with several feet of snow, with the roads covered in an icy sheet, and even with ice chunks falling down from the sky. I guess Wisconsin just creates a different threshold for the stuff. After all, if we canceled school for every snowstorm we’ve had here, we’d be in school until June the next year! Maybe that’s what the comic means. … … Nah.

My early school years started in August and ended in June, but the university I go to now starts the day after Labor Day and ends mid-May, depending on when exams are.

By: Powers

Powers — Wed, 27 Feb 2008 13:12:31 +0000

Good lord.

First of all, Frank, did it ever occur to you that maybe kids these days have *more to learn* then “back then”? Like, computers and technology? Schools are increasing the amount of education in health, home economics, music, art, and technology, but they can’t sacrifice reading, ‘riting, and ‘rithmetic so the school year ends up being longer. TA DA!!

Charlene, to say that people in the US get a day off school “if it snow[s]” is misleading. That’s only true down south where they don’t have snowplows. Up here in New York, if the buses can safely travel the roads, school’s on. Are you saying they don’t cancel school in Calgary even if travel is dangerous?

By: Charlene

Charlene — Wed, 27 Feb 2008 07:31:50 +0000

Here school has always begun around Labour Day (either the day after or the Thursday before, if in September) and lasted until June 30.

On the other hand, the schools here never close down for weather. Never. Until the Internet made communications easier, most students in Calgary had no idea that people in the US got a day off school if it snowed. Even now it makes me snicker.

By: Cidu Bill

Cidu Bill — Wed, 27 Feb 2008 01:51:20 +0000

At least in most of New York and New Jersey, “the old days” are still here: School begins a day or two after Labor Day and ends around June 20.

By: Frank

Frank — Wed, 27 Feb 2008 01:38:58 +0000

In the old days in New England the public schools usually went from a couple of days after Labour Day through the third week in June. The private schools had a shorter year, say September 21st through May 10th. The Parochial schools somewhere in between. In rural areas adjustments were made for planting and harvest needs. Now days its seems that the kids go to school with maybe the month of july off. We learnt more then. Is Lindsey right? Were we smarter? No just more was expected of us.

By: Schist Happens

Schist Happens — Tue, 26 Feb 2008 21:53:47 +0000

And we never started back to school in the fall until after Labor Day, but it seems common for kids to start going back in August now.

By: Lola

Lola — Tue, 26 Feb 2008 21:23:46 +0000

I think this is more an age thing. When I went to school in Michigan (back in the Pleistocene epoch :), we got out when there was still at least a week left in May and didn’t start until the middle of September. I don’t live there anymore, but have relatives who do, and their grandkids all go until June now. You see, kids, we were smarter in those days, learned faster, so we could do that. Probably has more to do with mothers working, but I LIKE the “used to be smarter” explanation.

By: Lindsey ^_^

Lindsey ^_^ — Tue, 26 Feb 2008 20:22:07 +0000

I get that SeanG, but in a lot of parts of the country kids go to school in June regardless, so it doesn’t make a lot of sense. I went 13 years in the public school system here without having a single snow day (it doesn’t snow) and only maybe two 3-hour-late days because of fog, but the schools here still get out in June anyway.

By: SeanG

SeanG — Tue, 26 Feb 2008 19:51:45 +0000

If you have more snow days than are budgeted for a given year, you have to make them up by going to school for more days at the end of the year.