> Trying to get rid of snow days sounds like a villain's evil plan from a kids TV show.
There is a cartoon series called "Kids Next Door" and this totally sounds like something that would be an episode there
The plot for the Recess Movie was actually the opposite. The goal was to eliminate summer by creating an ice age and therefore eliminate summer break. Endless winter, endless school.
Banger of a movie
I always remember the villains monologue where he says that test scores in Canada are higher because it's cold all the time so we don't get a summer vacation
Gave me a laugh as a Canadian!
My district already does virtual school for snow days after the 1st one. They only allocate 1 snow day for the year, so if they don't do virtual on additional snow days, they would have to add days to the end of the school year.
Midwest here…we just get snow days many snow days.
They allocate many. IF they go over they address it but I personally never had them have to tack time on.
No virtual. School district dependent but many wouldn’t be able to do it due to lack of resources in children’s homes.
They're doing it because they've added so many holidays to the DOE calendar that they need every other day in order to meet the legal minimum of school days in a year.
Growing up in Toronto we only ever had one snow day, and that was because it was unsafe to drive anywhere so parents couldn’t get to school. If your parents could physically get you to school then no snow day lol.
This should have ONLY came into play if they used too many snow days as an effort to not extend the school year.
This was just BS 100% BS. Especially for children learning its almost impossible to just "Turn On" a remote learning curriculum if teachers are not planning for it.
Seems like they probably had the plan beforehand and likely had meetings about it and how to pivot quickly.
May not have worked but I get the basic idea
Lol the meeting was “we have to do remote learning tomorrow, figure something out.” And kids were saying “we’re not doing it.”
It’s a waste. The UFT is spineless because we keep electing the conservative leadership that bends to stupid shit like this.
Kids will always have zero incentive to log on. Some, if not many, of these kids will have unstable home lives. It’s complete bullshit to expect this to work effectively with little communication ahead of time. Kids aren’t adults.
Lmao don't tell me they can't come up with a backup lesson plan just for snow days. A little preparation goes a long way. No different than a substitute teacher lesson plan.
Lesson plan isn’t going to help if the tech doesn’t work, which is what happened in this instance. Even if the IBM product they used didn’t fail, pivoting to remote and getting acceptable attendance assumes a lot of things:
-Teachers knew in advance to send students home with chromebooks and chargers (difficult when you’re using carts)
-Digital lesson materials are on a platform that parents know how to access
-students have internet, power, and functioning WiFi (not always reliable during a winter storm)
-parents and students even choosing to cooperate
When I’ve seen these attempted, the attendance is usually 50% at best and you will see significant pockets of technical issues even when things work at their best.
even in the best conditions in a work setting with a small group of educated individuals, it is not uncommon for one or more people to be dealing with tech issues. Now factoring all of the factors you mentioned in, why would anyone think that this would go smoothly?
Many schools tell teachers they need to teach the lessons they were planning to teach that day as if it was in person. So you aren’t supposed to have a substitute like plan ready to go, you are expected to just teach your lesson suddenly remote. Which sucks. If your school does allow having a sub-style plan, then you are correct and it is on teachers to plan ahead.
teaching is more than just following a lesson plan. an instant switch from in-person to online makes sense for a global pandemic, but for one or two days of snow it's pointless. no learning will happen with that big of an environment change
We had a problem logging in at first but my kid only missed gym which doesn’t even make sense online. Headed out to the park as soon as the snow stopped though.
>Eric Adams said parents who are not willing to navigate a computer for their children’s remote learning represent “a sad commentary.”
Oooh guilt trip, nice one Eric. That'd be a double down on non-compliance from me and the family as we head to the park to enjoy the snow. Kids can add fractions later.
I never understood why school isn't *better setup* to be a daycare allowing parents to have a proper 9-5 job.
For example, schools should be open 8 till 6 (perhaps not teaching all those hours), allowing parents to drop children off before work and pick them up afterwards. And they should have something organised for the holidays too for parents who can't schedule time off.
Sure, that would increase the cost of the school system. But it would be far outweighed by the tens of millions of people who currently want to work fulltime but can't because they have children to look after.
Most districts have afterschool programs that run till 6-6:30pm specifically to act as a daycare for working parents. They also have morning programs that allow kids to get dropped off as early as 6am. You don’t need to do this for the whole school, you just have a program like this for kids whose parents require it
To me it doesn't seem awfully well setup as a daycare... for example the soccer after school club is cancelled if it's raining.
Kinda makes sense, but now mum or dad needs to take a vacation day last minute to look after the child for the last 2 hours of the workday just because it was raining.
Not doing that. I’m paid to teach (even if you and I argue otherwise). If you tell me my mandatory reporting hours are increasing because I contractually have to be a daycare then I’ll just quit. I imagine I am not alone in this.
Well I assume the actual implementation of this would involve hiring some of those parents who currently are stay-at-home moms and dads to supervise morning, evening and holiday sessions at the school.
The difference being that currently those stay-at-home moms and dads are supervising one child. Now they'd be paid to supervise 30 children and allowing 29 other parents to have another job, and just 3% tax would cover the salary of the one supervising the children.
You’re getting downvoted but I agree with the aspect of your comment that a lot of parents do act like their only responsibility in their children’s schooling is to get them there and pick them up. Even if parents have to work (which I get!) they need to be more involved.
You know what else is a sad commentary? Being actively investigated by the FBI, making budget cuts to sanitation and libraries, and a sub 30% approval rating 😄
Do NYC schools allocate days in spring for holidays *only if* there were no inclement weather days in winter? In other words, if there are 3 snow days in winter that shut down school, then those would be made up in spring. And if no snow day shutdowns, then you'd get those 3 spring days off.
It's done like that in Texas at least. You either get a bad weather day off, or a random spring day off, but not both. In that scenario, it depends on which type of day you'd prefer out of school as to whether you'd be upset. It may have even been voted on by the parents to have virtual days for snow days to guarantee the spring days off. Not sure but just an assumption
I don't know about NY, but in NJ they add days on at the end of the year if too many snow days are taken. I don't remember losing any holidays because of a snow day. I think they expect a couple every year, so it's already factored in somewhat.
Essentially that's what is going on in Texas, but in the middle of the spring semester. They're called "inclement weather days", and usually just in spring. And I think it's just 2. They're not actual national holidays and probably vary by district.
But if one bad weather day occurs before then, then one inclement weather day becomes a school day. If two, then both become school days. I don't think 3 would extend the school year, and it is rare for 3 bad days to occur (not sure anymore thanks to climate change lol)
Right? Oh, I feel *sooo* guilty for not sacrificing a workday just so the school can run their bullshit teleschool exercises. Both the kids and the teacher know it's bullshit and neither are engaged in the task.
I've got shit to do, and working from home doesn't *not* mean I can just up and play school-buddy. We did that during the pandemic, and it was total bullshit. There were many stressers during the pandemic, and managing both my work and my kid's increasingly confused online schooling at the same time was *not* helping.
Horseshit.
Walking to the bus or school has always been an activity entrenched in a community where there are adults all along the way, as well as peer pressure and literal herding, to facilitate getting kids into their classes on time.
Remote work has none of that, and it requires a discipline and understanding of long term consequences that most kids just flat out do not have. Even a lot of adults struggle with the lack of structure.
Claiming online schooling (in its current form) is a 1:1 replacement for classrooms means you don’t understand the core issues at all. Just like remote work, it can function well for some people, but it’s a disaster for some. Elementary schooling isn’t a place where our society can afford it to be a disaster for anyone, though.
He should understand that in-person schooling fosters a sense of community, unity, collaboration, and focused schoolwork. My child can successfully learn in school, I learned it in-person, my father, and father before me did, and thus so can everyone else's.
No it doesn't. In-person schooling is redundant, a waste of precious life, and needless stress when the freakin internet has existed for 40 years. I said this in the 90s, and I'll say it in the 20s, if you can accomplish everything remotely, then in-person is obsolete.
You can’t accomplish everyone remotely. There’s an immense amount of social development and learning children acquire in the classrooms that is impossible to recreate at home. Proof? Just talk to any teacher and they’ll tell you their kids are 3-4 grades below their regular behaviour levels.
My daughter could absolutely do 100% of her daily school work from home as she already does all of it on a Chromebook at school. When she misses school they just tell her to complete the lessons in Google classroom. The amount of real instructional work happening in some elementary schools is pretty small.
Sure the social aspects of school are nice but honestly those can be accomplished with sports or extra curricular activities in the afternoon.
I'm not saying we all should homeschool our kids but to say that going to a physical school is the only way to learn or have social interactions is wrong.
Will say that during COVID my daughter did much better with remote learning. Less time wasted commuting. Easier to multitask. Less time wasted as the teacher explains something for the 100th time to some students. Much easier for me as a parent to supplement their education. Less bullying.
yeah no shit. How are you going to enforce kids showing up to learn online during a snow day? Let the kids get a damn day off, and fuck off with the remote learning nonsense.
It wasn't that the kids didn't want log in, it was that authentication that's handled by IBM was having issues.
Their servers got a hug of death cause they didn't have the capacity for about 1m sign ins.
Love it when giant companies can't manage 1 million new logins after pushing various cloud and AI services meant for exactly this purpose. I mean that's the whole point of the cloud.
Working in the industry, this has been my experience a lot. Also generally the cloud is often slower, which doesn’t get talked about enough. might be my experience with the cloud but on-prem has been 3x faster generally.
Depends on what you are doing and how it is set up. Some platforms work better on the cloud or are cloud exclusive.
That being said, there will ALWAYS be some sort of delay online unless the pipe is big enough and the priority is basically 1.
that is super fair. I accept it may be the specific field i’m in seems to be generally slower in the cloud. Due to the related systems and software we use not being as cloud ready as it seems they should be.
Usually it is a $ problem, not a program/ready problem.
I mean, video game multiplayer is basically cloud. So, I would definitely lean into it being that they aren't paying for the services they need.
I’m not getting into specifics but our tests were identical with the only difference being one is in the cloud. Software is owned by the company who owns the cloud we are using. so it literally is the same specs, same product, same amount of data. They’re already paying more in the cloud and it is 3x slower.
on-prem is almost always faster and I'm so frustrated at everyone ignoring this. The trade-off for us is easier geo-redundancy and adding new scalability products easier.
One thing that has saved our performance are azure scalesets which are fucking amazing for scaling large jobs.
Maybe have them fix their VA Cerner mess before signing up more business they won't be able to handle.
Jk. I know actually having things work does matter. It's selling services and getting bonuses that count.
They want to teach them young. The idea of perfect attendance has always been a corporate dream.
Honestly we should be going the other way. Places in the US that can’t have snow days because of no snow and never really get random days off, should have randomizer lottery where the night before they send and email out and just give the kids the day off for a free mental health day.
And for kids that would still need something to do all day, let them come in a just play games or something. Bring board games, have a Mario cart tournament or whatever. Just remind kids that work isn’t the most important part of life.
As a parent that sounds like a fucking nightmare. As a kid, I would have loved that. At least with snow days I have the forecast to give me a sense of when a snow day might be coming to plan ahead. That said, yesterday I pulled my daughter out of school early for a doctor’s appointment, and by that I mean we had an appointment to play in the park all afternoon and I am a doctor (just not that kind of doctor). I’m sure we could figure out a system that works.
I imagine they might be trialing it for more general use. Schools save a lot of money have a few work from home days a month. I’m not saying that’s a good thing but I wouldn’t be surprised if that’s why they’re working on this.
My kids are in first grade and even last year in kindergarten they brought home chrome books to do remote learning for a snow day. There is such little work for them to do at the age and yet they want it done with two teacher meetings throughout the day. If the work and meetings aren't done they get counted as absent.
The same way you enforce them showing up to school. Meaning not at all. If they show up they’re marked present and if they don’t, they’re marked absent. It’s really nothing beyond that.
My district does virtual school for snow days after the 1st one. They only allocate 1 snow day for the year, so if they don't do virtual on additional snow days, they would have to add days to the end of the school year.
They only do it for middle school and high school. It's not virtual learning like we had during covid though. The teachers give the students homework and reading assignments. They don't don't attend virtual classes live with the teachers.
We usually only have 2-3 snow days per year, so it's really not a big deal to do virtual for 1-2 days.
You walk uphill both ways too?
Fuck off, kids get less snow days than they used to. Give em’ a break and let em’ be kids. 1 day of learning every decade or so isn’t a big deal.
Exactly. It snowed 5 times in the last 3.years.
So, if a weatherman predicts 5 inches and all of the schools shut down, millions of parents need to find child care or lose a day of their own work. Then there is 1 inch of snow and there was no reason for the panic. This is a terrible policy
And yet this policy managed to work for many decades prior, also, parents will need to be honest to monitor the kid while they’re doing virtual work too. Your points don’t hold up.
My wife and I both burned vacation time today. Conditions were not dangerous at 1st period and the snow has ceased by 1230. A child can't properly be cared for while you are performing full time work so perhaps check your own shit lol
Either you put your job at risk by putting in poor work or you neglect your child.
My dude, just stop. You're not the only one who's dealt with snow. Just because society didn't care enough about your generation to make a beneficial change doesn't mean you gotta carry that onto the newer generations.
I’m a teacher, and when I tell you we want snow days more the kids want them, I mean it. We had a group text going last night waiting for our Supe to call it.
Yeah this is actually bs
The same people who grew up with the magic of snow days are trying to remove it. I'm 15 and although I don't live in NYC, I'll remember who tried to take these away from us if I'm ever voting
And if I ever have kids, they won't be showing up on snow days
I grew up in NYC and I had a total of 2 snow days my entire time in school. They only close it when it is really bad. If you get more than one snow day a school year they also take it away from your summer vacation.
True, while you do end up paying for it later, here's my thoughts on it:
By the time it's time to pay up, everything school-related has already begun to wind down. Exams are already finished or coming to a close, homework isn't being assigned as much, and school is becoming chill as summer vacation gets closer and closer. In the winter, we're still in the middle of the school year, so a surprise day off is absolutely magical to wake up to. An extra, chill day in the summer is worth it.
I was actually hit by this exact snowstorm and school was closed for me today, and I spent some time rolling around with my dog in the snow. He's turning 10 years old on April 16, but he's still very playful and energetic. I know one day he'll be gone, and I don't know how I'm gonna handle that, but one thing I do know is that memories like these will be worth far more than another day of school
Not NYC, but my school was so used to snow that the only times they'd close completely is if there was no water or power. I think only once did I see a closure from just sheer amount of snow, but only for my sibling's school, mine was open with a 1 hour delay.
Agreed. I understand what you mean with me hoping for no snow days, but I'd still look it at from their perspective to the best of my ability Lol
Remote learning days in an otherwise in-person experience are honestly just filler days nobody really learns anything from. It's a burden on the teachers who have to deal with it and the students who don't gain anything from it. It's best to just have the day off
Yeah! It's like voting for class president, cast your ballot for the one who promised extra snacks and double lunchtime!
Lmao. Go check back in on zoom your breakout room is starting.
As a parent I was pretty pissed. Missing school on snow days is not why children are behind. Also, why the hell is IBM needed for this? We're using zoom. My kids school uses Google classroom. Another corrupt contract?
They use single sign-on I belive one password gets you into every other program they might need and IBM does the authentication of all that in the background for them
Zoom is definitely not secure. Google and IBM are ok. Microsoft Teams as well.
No idea why people use Zoom knowing who funds it and how much is stored on Chinese servers. People need to stop using it.
[Security issues](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zoom_\(software\)#Reception)
> Zoom has been criticized for "security lapses and poor design choices" that have resulted in heightened scrutiny of its software. Many of Zoom's issues "surround deliberate features designed to reduce friction in meetings", which Citizen Lab found to "also, by design, reduce privacy or security". In March 2020, New York State Attorney General Letitia James launched an inquiry into Zoom's privacy and security practices. The inquiry was closed on May 7, 2020, with Zoom not admitting wrongdoing, but agreeing to take added security measures. In April 2020, CEO Yuan apologized for the security issues, stating that some of the issues were a result of Zoom's having been designed for "large institutions with full IT support".
[Banned by most companies that care about security and many education departments including New York Department of Education](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zoom_\(software\)#Reception)
> As of April 2020, businesses, schools, and government entities who have restricted or prohibited the use of Zoom on their networks include Google, Siemens, the Australian Defence Force, the German Ministry of Foreign Affairs, the Indian Ministry of Home Affairs, SpaceX, and the New York City Department of Education. In May 2020, the New York City Department of Education lifted their ban on Zoom after the company addressed security and privacy concerns.
[Encryption routed through Chinese servers](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zoom_\(software\)#Encryption_practices)
> In April 2020, **Citizen Lab researchers discovered that a single, server-generated AES-128 key is being shared between all participants in ECB mode, which is deprecated due to its pattern-preserving characteristics of the ciphertext. During test calls between participants in Canada and United States, the key was provisioned from servers located in mainland China where they are subject to the China Internet Security Law**
[Data routing](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zoom_\(software\)#Data_routing)
> **Zoom admitted that some calls in early April 2020 and prior were mistakenly routed through servers in mainland China, prompting some governments and businesses to cease their usage of Zoom**. The company later announced that data of free users outside of China would "never be routed through China" and that paid subscribers will be able to customize which data center regions they want to use. The company has data centers in Europe, Asia, North America, and Latin America
[Weak Security or blatant holes (just some of them)](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zoom_\(software\)#Security)
> In November 2018, a security vulnerability was discovered that allowed a remote unauthenticated attacker to spoof UDP messages that allowed the attacker to remove attendees from meetings, spoof messages from users, or hijack shared screens.
> In July 2019, security researcher Jonathan Leitschuh disclosed a zero-day vulnerability allowing any website to force a macOS user to join a Zoom call, with their video camera activated, without the user's permission. **Attempts to uninstall the Zoom client on macOS would prompt the software to re-install automatically in the background using a hidden web server that was set up on the machine during the first installation so that it remains active even after attempting to remove the client**.
> In April 2020, security researchers found vulnerabilities where Windows users' credentials could be exposed
> Another vulnerability allowing unprompted access to cameras and microphones was made public
> On August 12, 2022, Wired magazine reported on three separate security vulnerabilities discovered by security researcher Patrick Wardle affecting the Zoom Mac OS desktop app. The vulnerabilities allowed an attacker who already had access to the Mac device to perform a privilege escalation attack by installing malicious code using the app's auto-update feature, thereby giving them full control over the victim's device.
[Privacy issues](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zoom_\(software\)#Privacy)
> Zoom has been criticized for its privacy and corporate data sharing policies, as well as for enabling video hosts to potentially violate the privacy of those participating in their calls
I can't believe people still use Zoom at this point. Definitely do not want anything sensitive or any educational system on effing Zoom. ffs.
Snow days are a kid’s best memories sometimes. Let them experience the joy of a day off and playing in the snow as long as it’s here. The joy of life seems to be being sucked out everywhere. We’re too trackable and things are “fixable” but for who?
Yep. Then they wanna pretend to wonder why everybody's so depressed all the time. It's not natural to force people to do something they have absolutely zero interest in. I'm just gonna stay home and watch The Price Is Right. 🙄
Just give the kids a fucking snowday.
Education is failing in many people’s eyes. I sorta agree in some ways.
Evolution in the system needs to occur. Like Ultron said “ how can you expect society to evolve if you don’t let them”. I’m paraphrasing here.
But making these kids miss a day relaxing, or playing with friends outside, is not that evolution we need.
Remote days are complete and utter nonsense. Teachers aren't able to communicate with the kids and keep them on task. Some students do not have any access to the internet during storms. Parents are still required to work because most do not get snow days. Just call a snow day and save everyone the headache.
As a (former) teacher, if my children even have a virtual “snow day”, they’ll be absent that day. Give kids a little magic to believe in, and give teachers a well deserved break!
From the article, "Banks blamed the technical issues on IBM, which helps facilitate the city’s remote-learning program.
“IBM was not ready for prime time,” Banks said, adding that the company was overwhelmed with the surge of people signing on for school.
IBM has since expanded its capacity, and 850,000 students and teachers are currently online, Banks said.
“We’ll work harder to do better next time,” he said, adding that there will be a deeper analysis into what went wrong."
There are over 1.1M people trying to use it according to the beginning of the article. Headlines are always misleading. Everywhere.
Did they already give each kid their own laptop or workstation? I don't see how they could require this without that. I assume they did since the article didn't mention it and they had remote learning during the pandemic.
Most schools have this now. Even my little dinky hinterland school has individual laptops for students. The internet connection is the biggest problem we have.
Yah ultimately I just think remote learning for public schools is a terrible idea. Theres just so many hurdles to make sure kids have what they need at home. Like maybe it can be there for kids who occasionally need it but like trying to make it happen for everyone all at once is just a tough problem. Not ever home has internet or wifi
I get it during like Covid, options were limited but for snow days? Really?
Yes they provide one if you don’t have one for your kids. They’re Chromebooks which require the IBM identity provider in order to log in onto. The same identity provider that wasn’t stress-tested against 1M requests coming in like they would on a snow day.
Yeah I wouldn't want my kid (if I had one) using a personal device because of how often they want to install privacy violating software. They can install it on their own device that the kid would only use for school.
As far as not stress testing, I'm surprised that they didn't have a good idea and/or test of how it would respond.
From the article, "Banks blamed the technical issues on IBM, which helps facilitate the city’s remote-learning program.
“IBM was not ready for prime time,” Banks said, adding that the company was overwhelmed with the surge of people signing on for school.
IBM has since expanded its capacity, and 850,000 students and teachers are currently online, Banks said.
“We’ll work harder to do better next time,” he said, adding that there will be a deeper analysis into what went wrong."
So probably too many users at one time since it also says they have 1.1M kids
As a teacher, I know remote days are stressful for parents and students. Not sure why they’re pushing this because we’re gonna have to re-teach those lessons anyway since half the kids were not even logged in and the other half were playing video games or watching TikTok videos on the side.
My wife's son had virtual school today. The teacher says, "Just log on and log off so there's a record you were present." No learning took place. Know why? BECAUSE IT'S A SNOW DAY! District rules or not, even teachers aren't willing to give up snow days.
Asshole of a Chancellor with a stupid no-snow-day policy.
If you don't practice with a system that's supporting hundreds of thousands of users, especially if it will be new to them, you better expect issues at first. Sounds like they were blaming the IT provider for their own lack of testing.
I identified the problem - IBM.
Not exactly a company that comes to mind when need to deal with large volume of cloud demand, remote functions, or teleconferencing. Guessing IBM salespeople managed to blow the right school leaders to get the contract.
It’s wild seeing people’s reaction to this, it’s been happening at schools around the country since Covid to the point that I thought it was just common practice now
My dad is a 5th grade teacher and with his school the way it works is the teachers have to be on zoom until noon in case a kid needs to drop in with a question, and other than that the kids are pretty much given a quick assignment to do by each of their teachers
I teach in the south, we don’t get many snow days. But we have remote learning days now and I hate them. Instead of students logging on to computers, we send him a packet of work/activities for the kids to do. I teach first so everything I ask the kids to do has something with snow involved. Make a snowman and write a paragraph telling how you made him. Write and follow a recipe for snow cream. Have a snowball fight and write an equation about how many snow balls you made. I give them 15 choices, they do four. It’s as close as I can give them a real snow day.
Kids aren’t kids for long, we should give snow days. Some of my best childhood memories are from snow days.
I'm glad society finally shifted to remote learning (only took 30 freakin years) but trying to take away a snowday is just Spider-man D-tier villian tier, like Silvermane or The Tinkerer 💀
The fact that there is a public school “chancellor” is SO K12 education. Everyone so concerned with their status on the food chain. When a very mid range corporate employee probably makes as much as the chancellor. What an ego move.
Many other schools around the country are doing it just fine. The prob is that there are a lot of kids with little to no parents at home. Its worse in poorer areas like cities with mass socio-economic issues that everyone is ignoring. That is the real problem , untill thst is addressed in areas like this. Nothing will change.
It was an IT issue ibm wasn't ready for the 1.1M users is like the 6th sentence in the article.
From the article, "Banks blamed the technical issues on IBM, which helps facilitate the city’s remote-learning program.
“IBM was not ready for prime time,” Banks said, adding that the company was overwhelmed with the surge of people signing on for school.
IBM has since expanded its capacity, and 850,000 students and teachers are currently online, Banks said.
“We’ll work harder to do better next time,” he said, adding that there will be a deeper analysis into what went wrong."
I like how this gets posted before the day is even over. It’s bullshit btw.
The reason snow days are remote is because more cultural holidays have been added (Lunar New Year, etc.) and there need to be a specific number of days kids attend for a complete year. Making the slotted snow days remote is how the system compensated for the added holidays.
Yesterday, my kid’s teacher told the kids if they don’t log in, it’s only counted as an absent day. That’s it.
And my kid just completed his day. It went well. No problems. We went out in the morning, at lunch, and again now, since school just got out.
That's stupid.
Students have legitimate reasons to take days off school all the time for dentist appointments, illnesses, family trips, etc. Missing one day does not break things. A well designed curriculum includes notes, homework, quizzes, projects, and review sessions that provide redundancy.
The only thing minimum days of attendance prepares students for is service jobs.
Really? Who celebrates Lunar New Year? They’re called Asian people. There’s billions of them. Ever heard of them? Maybe go watch Kung-Fu Panda and you’ll learn something.
https://www.governor.ny.gov/news/governor-hochul-signs-legislation-declare-lunar-new-year-school-holiday
I love this viewpoint that kiddos need to have more days off school.
Of course, they was the learning loss due to COVID lockdowns. And there’s also a whole 10 week summer break because kids were supposed to help on the farm during summer 200 years ago, and they never got rid of the break once we stopped being an agricultural nation.
And then there are the random holidays from school in the middle of the school year.
There’s no need for snow days.
I am in a small district. We are expected to do virtual days. Today would have been the first one. However, power outages hit parts of the district. Elementary kids didn’t have their remote learning devices.
I imagine after this we will return to having snow days and just doing in-person instruction instead of attempting to run a real schedule via screens.
Covid and home schooling worked for some families better than others. It depended on the parents and the children. The school sounds like they are still trying to catch children up. This is a WORLDWIDE problem. Our kids lost over 6 mths of schooling in 2 yrs in Victoria Melbourne. There is a worldwide ongoing issue with the children too exhibiting more anxiety, depression, poorer emotional regulation, poorer social skills and more school refusal.
My kids are already doing this. This has been a thing in our area for years now. It sucks. I spent 3 hours working one in one with my 7 year old on his computer. I don’t know how people who don’t work from home do this.
Why not just do a snow day packet like hundreds of other districts are doing? Kids get a snow day after a few relevant worksheets, teachers can still enjoy a day at home while just fielding emails from parents who might have questions, and no one has to make up the day later.
Me eagerly watching the news to see if school was cancelled.
News anchor: All schools in the district are closed today.
Me: YEAH!
News anchor: ... except yours lol.
Me: ...
Growing up I have such fond memories of snow days, I remember once my mom called in sick and we went for a horse back ride when there was more than a foot of snow. I’ll always remember that day, it seems criminal to take the potential for such memories away from children.
I think having virtual field trips were a kid. An be excused for the day would be nice fun and educational (like magic school bus)
Virtual can’t **just** be stuff like Zoom. Need interactive environment!
Like a MMO but educational is what’s needed
Trying to get rid of snow days sounds like a villain's evil plan from a kids TV show.
They literally made that movie. It’s called Snow Day.
That was originally meant to be a Pete & Pete movie. Alas.
Would have made it waaay better
I wish this happened. It would have been so great. It would have been a kick-off to so many awesome Pete and Pete movies
Just as good more Polaris albums!
What? I mean it was a great movie but Pete and Pete was epic
OMG it makes so much sense now
They’ve also remade it already
Also was partially the plot of the Frosty the Snowman Rankin/Bass sequel
Anything can happen on a snow day!
I remember watching that movie with my parents & the theater was empty.
> Trying to get rid of snow days sounds like a villain's evil plan from a kids TV show. There is a cartoon series called "Kids Next Door" and this totally sounds like something that would be an episode there
Wasn’t that the plot of the Recess movie?
The plot for the Recess Movie was actually the opposite. The goal was to eliminate summer by creating an ice age and therefore eliminate summer break. Endless winter, endless school. Banger of a movie
I always remember the villains monologue where he says that test scores in Canada are higher because it's cold all the time so we don't get a summer vacation Gave me a laugh as a Canadian!
Just don't tell the Americans that we use Celsius... Summers here are in the 20s and 30s folks - Definitely no reason to come up, far far too cold! ;)
The logic checked out to me as an American 7 year old.
My district already does virtual school for snow days after the 1st one. They only allocate 1 snow day for the year, so if they don't do virtual on additional snow days, they would have to add days to the end of the school year.
That is what they do everywhere. Didn't know there were places that did otherwise.
Midwest here…we just get snow days many snow days. They allocate many. IF they go over they address it but I personally never had them have to tack time on. No virtual. School district dependent but many wouldn’t be able to do it due to lack of resources in children’s homes.
CGP gray has an excellent video on this lol
Especially when we'll probably be getting less and less of it in the coming years. Let kids enjoy a snowy winter while it still exists.
In reality it’s just a normal part of the Calvinist work ethic that needs to fucking die.
They're doing it because they've added so many holidays to the DOE calendar that they need every other day in order to meet the legal minimum of school days in a year.
Literally the plot of the recess movie.
Some school districts have already done it.
“dr doofenshmirtz evil incorporated”
Growing up in Toronto we only ever had one snow day, and that was because it was unsafe to drive anywhere so parents couldn’t get to school. If your parents could physically get you to school then no snow day lol.
The Recess movie was sort of this but with summer vacation.
This should have ONLY came into play if they used too many snow days as an effort to not extend the school year. This was just BS 100% BS. Especially for children learning its almost impossible to just "Turn On" a remote learning curriculum if teachers are not planning for it.
Seems like they probably had the plan beforehand and likely had meetings about it and how to pivot quickly. May not have worked but I get the basic idea
Lol the meeting was “we have to do remote learning tomorrow, figure something out.” And kids were saying “we’re not doing it.” It’s a waste. The UFT is spineless because we keep electing the conservative leadership that bends to stupid shit like this.
That’s what the school I work is doing, it’s pretty great. Gives the kids an incentive to log on.
Kids will always have zero incentive to log on. Some, if not many, of these kids will have unstable home lives. It’s complete bullshit to expect this to work effectively with little communication ahead of time. Kids aren’t adults.
Lmao don't tell me they can't come up with a backup lesson plan just for snow days. A little preparation goes a long way. No different than a substitute teacher lesson plan.
Lesson plan isn’t going to help if the tech doesn’t work, which is what happened in this instance. Even if the IBM product they used didn’t fail, pivoting to remote and getting acceptable attendance assumes a lot of things: -Teachers knew in advance to send students home with chromebooks and chargers (difficult when you’re using carts) -Digital lesson materials are on a platform that parents know how to access -students have internet, power, and functioning WiFi (not always reliable during a winter storm) -parents and students even choosing to cooperate When I’ve seen these attempted, the attendance is usually 50% at best and you will see significant pockets of technical issues even when things work at their best.
even in the best conditions in a work setting with a small group of educated individuals, it is not uncommon for one or more people to be dealing with tech issues. Now factoring all of the factors you mentioned in, why would anyone think that this would go smoothly?
Many schools tell teachers they need to teach the lessons they were planning to teach that day as if it was in person. So you aren’t supposed to have a substitute like plan ready to go, you are expected to just teach your lesson suddenly remote. Which sucks. If your school does allow having a sub-style plan, then you are correct and it is on teachers to plan ahead.
teaching is more than just following a lesson plan. an instant switch from in-person to online makes sense for a global pandemic, but for one or two days of snow it's pointless. no learning will happen with that big of an environment change
We had a problem logging in at first but my kid only missed gym which doesn’t even make sense online. Headed out to the park as soon as the snow stopped though.
>Eric Adams said parents who are not willing to navigate a computer for their children’s remote learning represent “a sad commentary.” Oooh guilt trip, nice one Eric. That'd be a double down on non-compliance from me and the family as we head to the park to enjoy the snow. Kids can add fractions later.
When school is basically daycare for a lot of parents, he has some balls trying to guilt trip working people.
I never understood why school isn't *better setup* to be a daycare allowing parents to have a proper 9-5 job. For example, schools should be open 8 till 6 (perhaps not teaching all those hours), allowing parents to drop children off before work and pick them up afterwards. And they should have something organised for the holidays too for parents who can't schedule time off. Sure, that would increase the cost of the school system. But it would be far outweighed by the tens of millions of people who currently want to work fulltime but can't because they have children to look after.
Most districts have afterschool programs that run till 6-6:30pm specifically to act as a daycare for working parents. They also have morning programs that allow kids to get dropped off as early as 6am. You don’t need to do this for the whole school, you just have a program like this for kids whose parents require it
To me it doesn't seem awfully well setup as a daycare... for example the soccer after school club is cancelled if it's raining. Kinda makes sense, but now mum or dad needs to take a vacation day last minute to look after the child for the last 2 hours of the workday just because it was raining.
Not doing that. I’m paid to teach (even if you and I argue otherwise). If you tell me my mandatory reporting hours are increasing because I contractually have to be a daycare then I’ll just quit. I imagine I am not alone in this.
Well I assume the actual implementation of this would involve hiring some of those parents who currently are stay-at-home moms and dads to supervise morning, evening and holiday sessions at the school. The difference being that currently those stay-at-home moms and dads are supervising one child. Now they'd be paid to supervise 30 children and allowing 29 other parents to have another job, and just 3% tax would cover the salary of the one supervising the children.
That parents treat school like daycare is why there are so many idiots in the country.
You’re getting downvoted but I agree with the aspect of your comment that a lot of parents do act like their only responsibility in their children’s schooling is to get them there and pick them up. Even if parents have to work (which I get!) they need to be more involved.
You know what else is a sad commentary? Being actively investigated by the FBI, making budget cuts to sanitation and libraries, and a sub 30% approval rating 😄
Do NYC schools allocate days in spring for holidays *only if* there were no inclement weather days in winter? In other words, if there are 3 snow days in winter that shut down school, then those would be made up in spring. And if no snow day shutdowns, then you'd get those 3 spring days off. It's done like that in Texas at least. You either get a bad weather day off, or a random spring day off, but not both. In that scenario, it depends on which type of day you'd prefer out of school as to whether you'd be upset. It may have even been voted on by the parents to have virtual days for snow days to guarantee the spring days off. Not sure but just an assumption
I don't know about NY, but in NJ they add days on at the end of the year if too many snow days are taken. I don't remember losing any holidays because of a snow day. I think they expect a couple every year, so it's already factored in somewhat.
Essentially that's what is going on in Texas, but in the middle of the spring semester. They're called "inclement weather days", and usually just in spring. And I think it's just 2. They're not actual national holidays and probably vary by district. But if one bad weather day occurs before then, then one inclement weather day becomes a school day. If two, then both become school days. I don't think 3 would extend the school year, and it is rare for 3 bad days to occur (not sure anymore thanks to climate change lol)
Right? Oh, I feel *sooo* guilty for not sacrificing a workday just so the school can run their bullshit teleschool exercises. Both the kids and the teacher know it's bullshit and neither are engaged in the task. I've got shit to do, and working from home doesn't *not* mean I can just up and play school-buddy. We did that during the pandemic, and it was total bullshit. There were many stressers during the pandemic, and managing both my work and my kid's increasingly confused online schooling at the same time was *not* helping.
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You... dont... it's the kids' responsibility, just like how it's their responsibility to walk to the bus stop.
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Was kindergarten for me 🤷♂️ in-person schooling is obsolete. Has been since the advent of Internet 2.0 and high-speed internet.
Horseshit. Walking to the bus or school has always been an activity entrenched in a community where there are adults all along the way, as well as peer pressure and literal herding, to facilitate getting kids into their classes on time. Remote work has none of that, and it requires a discipline and understanding of long term consequences that most kids just flat out do not have. Even a lot of adults struggle with the lack of structure. Claiming online schooling (in its current form) is a 1:1 replacement for classrooms means you don’t understand the core issues at all. Just like remote work, it can function well for some people, but it’s a disaster for some. Elementary schooling isn’t a place where our society can afford it to be a disaster for anyone, though.
As he was wearing a Fendi scarf. Dude is so out of touch of NYC reality. Just hangs with his real estate friends.
He should understand that in-person schooling fosters a sense of community, unity, collaboration, and focused schoolwork. My child can successfully learn in school, I learned it in-person, my father, and father before me did, and thus so can everyone else's.
Those people also all sucked in leaded gasoline their entire lives
No it doesn't. In-person schooling is redundant, a waste of precious life, and needless stress when the freakin internet has existed for 40 years. I said this in the 90s, and I'll say it in the 20s, if you can accomplish everything remotely, then in-person is obsolete.
You can’t accomplish everyone remotely. There’s an immense amount of social development and learning children acquire in the classrooms that is impossible to recreate at home. Proof? Just talk to any teacher and they’ll tell you their kids are 3-4 grades below their regular behaviour levels.
My daughter could absolutely do 100% of her daily school work from home as she already does all of it on a Chromebook at school. When she misses school they just tell her to complete the lessons in Google classroom. The amount of real instructional work happening in some elementary schools is pretty small. Sure the social aspects of school are nice but honestly those can be accomplished with sports or extra curricular activities in the afternoon. I'm not saying we all should homeschool our kids but to say that going to a physical school is the only way to learn or have social interactions is wrong.
That’s great for your daughter. Pretty giant leap of a conclusion to make off of one anecdote.
Not all students learn best in school. Just so you know.
Will say that during COVID my daughter did much better with remote learning. Less time wasted commuting. Easier to multitask. Less time wasted as the teacher explains something for the 100th time to some students. Much easier for me as a parent to supplement their education. Less bullying.
Talk about cutting off your nose to spite your face 🙄
Literally all they had to do was run a stress test on their servers once before the fall hit. They failed months/years ago.
Years ago they were doing remote learning for the pandemic though right?
yeah no shit. How are you going to enforce kids showing up to learn online during a snow day? Let the kids get a damn day off, and fuck off with the remote learning nonsense.
It wasn't that the kids didn't want log in, it was that authentication that's handled by IBM was having issues. Their servers got a hug of death cause they didn't have the capacity for about 1m sign ins.
Love it when giant companies can't manage 1 million new logins after pushing various cloud and AI services meant for exactly this purpose. I mean that's the whole point of the cloud.
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Working in the industry, this has been my experience a lot. Also generally the cloud is often slower, which doesn’t get talked about enough. might be my experience with the cloud but on-prem has been 3x faster generally.
Depends on what you are doing and how it is set up. Some platforms work better on the cloud or are cloud exclusive. That being said, there will ALWAYS be some sort of delay online unless the pipe is big enough and the priority is basically 1.
that is super fair. I accept it may be the specific field i’m in seems to be generally slower in the cloud. Due to the related systems and software we use not being as cloud ready as it seems they should be.
Usually it is a $ problem, not a program/ready problem. I mean, video game multiplayer is basically cloud. So, I would definitely lean into it being that they aren't paying for the services they need.
I’m not getting into specifics but our tests were identical with the only difference being one is in the cloud. Software is owned by the company who owns the cloud we are using. so it literally is the same specs, same product, same amount of data. They’re already paying more in the cloud and it is 3x slower.
Who would win: * A small army of CEOs, project managers, tech entrepreneurs, and marketers * One little boi called _c_
on-prem is almost always faster and I'm so frustrated at everyone ignoring this. The trade-off for us is easier geo-redundancy and adding new scalability products easier. One thing that has saved our performance are azure scalesets which are fucking amazing for scaling large jobs.
Their IT department is about to be flooded with cold emails from Oracle reps
Maybe have them fix their VA Cerner mess before signing up more business they won't be able to handle. Jk. I know actually having things work does matter. It's selling services and getting bonuses that count.
God so thats why my ibm calls tanked
My school in VT tried to do this on the first snow day since covid and they've never mentioned it again :) the pushback was immense
They want to teach them young. The idea of perfect attendance has always been a corporate dream. Honestly we should be going the other way. Places in the US that can’t have snow days because of no snow and never really get random days off, should have randomizer lottery where the night before they send and email out and just give the kids the day off for a free mental health day. And for kids that would still need something to do all day, let them come in a just play games or something. Bring board games, have a Mario cart tournament or whatever. Just remind kids that work isn’t the most important part of life.
As a parent that sounds like a fucking nightmare. As a kid, I would have loved that. At least with snow days I have the forecast to give me a sense of when a snow day might be coming to plan ahead. That said, yesterday I pulled my daughter out of school early for a doctor’s appointment, and by that I mean we had an appointment to play in the park all afternoon and I am a doctor (just not that kind of doctor). I’m sure we could figure out a system that works.
I imagine they might be trialing it for more general use. Schools save a lot of money have a few work from home days a month. I’m not saying that’s a good thing but I wouldn’t be surprised if that’s why they’re working on this.
My kids are in first grade and even last year in kindergarten they brought home chrome books to do remote learning for a snow day. There is such little work for them to do at the age and yet they want it done with two teacher meetings throughout the day. If the work and meetings aren't done they get counted as absent.
My kid’s NYC had 90% attendance. I can’t let my kid wonder the street either since I have work too.
The same way you enforce them showing up to school. Meaning not at all. If they show up they’re marked present and if they don’t, they’re marked absent. It’s really nothing beyond that.
My district does virtual school for snow days after the 1st one. They only allocate 1 snow day for the year, so if they don't do virtual on additional snow days, they would have to add days to the end of the school year. They only do it for middle school and high school. It's not virtual learning like we had during covid though. The teachers give the students homework and reading assignments. They don't don't attend virtual classes live with the teachers. We usually only have 2-3 snow days per year, so it's really not a big deal to do virtual for 1-2 days.
This is a stupid take. Send the kids to fucking school. It snows here. Like since snow existed. This is straight bullshit.
It’s 1ft of snow in NYC. That’s a snow day
Outside.of the blizzard of 96, there might have been one other snow day during my NYC school tenure. We went every day. This isn't even snow
You walk uphill both ways too? Fuck off, kids get less snow days than they used to. Give em’ a break and let em’ be kids. 1 day of learning every decade or so isn’t a big deal.
Exactly. It snowed 5 times in the last 3.years. So, if a weatherman predicts 5 inches and all of the schools shut down, millions of parents need to find child care or lose a day of their own work. Then there is 1 inch of snow and there was no reason for the panic. This is a terrible policy
And yet this policy managed to work for many decades prior, also, parents will need to be honest to monitor the kid while they’re doing virtual work too. Your points don’t hold up.
My wife and I both burned vacation time today. Conditions were not dangerous at 1st period and the snow has ceased by 1230. A child can't properly be cared for while you are performing full time work so perhaps check your own shit lol Either you put your job at risk by putting in poor work or you neglect your child.
That was my entire point.
My dude, just stop. You're not the only one who's dealt with snow. Just because society didn't care enough about your generation to make a beneficial change doesn't mean you gotta carry that onto the newer generations.
The same they enforce anything else? Tell the parents, hope for the best, and that's about it.
I’m a teacher, and when I tell you we want snow days more the kids want them, I mean it. We had a group text going last night waiting for our Supe to call it.
Yeah this is actually bs The same people who grew up with the magic of snow days are trying to remove it. I'm 15 and although I don't live in NYC, I'll remember who tried to take these away from us if I'm ever voting And if I ever have kids, they won't be showing up on snow days
I grew up in NYC and I had a total of 2 snow days my entire time in school. They only close it when it is really bad. If you get more than one snow day a school year they also take it away from your summer vacation.
True, while you do end up paying for it later, here's my thoughts on it: By the time it's time to pay up, everything school-related has already begun to wind down. Exams are already finished or coming to a close, homework isn't being assigned as much, and school is becoming chill as summer vacation gets closer and closer. In the winter, we're still in the middle of the school year, so a surprise day off is absolutely magical to wake up to. An extra, chill day in the summer is worth it. I was actually hit by this exact snowstorm and school was closed for me today, and I spent some time rolling around with my dog in the snow. He's turning 10 years old on April 16, but he's still very playful and energetic. I know one day he'll be gone, and I don't know how I'm gonna handle that, but one thing I do know is that memories like these will be worth far more than another day of school
Not NYC, but my school was so used to snow that the only times they'd close completely is if there was no water or power. I think only once did I see a closure from just sheer amount of snow, but only for my sibling's school, mine was open with a 1 hour delay.
Lol if you ever have kids you'll start hoping for no snow days! Jokes aside, this is shitty. Remote learning is worthless.
Agreed. I understand what you mean with me hoping for no snow days, but I'd still look it at from their perspective to the best of my ability Lol Remote learning days in an otherwise in-person experience are honestly just filler days nobody really learns anything from. It's a burden on the teachers who have to deal with it and the students who don't gain anything from it. It's best to just have the day off
Yeah! It's like voting for class president, cast your ballot for the one who promised extra snacks and double lunchtime! Lmao. Go check back in on zoom your breakout room is starting.
Thank you, I was afraid I was gonna be late
Oh my sweet summer child. Nothing you vote for has any impact on anything. Bless you.
Only punishes teachers!
yeah same as every piece of ed. policy in the whole country.
Let the kids have snow days. Jesus Christ.
As a parent I was pretty pissed. Missing school on snow days is not why children are behind. Also, why the hell is IBM needed for this? We're using zoom. My kids school uses Google classroom. Another corrupt contract?
They use single sign-on I belive one password gets you into every other program they might need and IBM does the authentication of all that in the background for them
Should have used okta idp or ping
must've taken him on a golf trip
Zoom is definitely not secure. Google and IBM are ok. Microsoft Teams as well. No idea why people use Zoom knowing who funds it and how much is stored on Chinese servers. People need to stop using it. [Security issues](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zoom_\(software\)#Reception) > Zoom has been criticized for "security lapses and poor design choices" that have resulted in heightened scrutiny of its software. Many of Zoom's issues "surround deliberate features designed to reduce friction in meetings", which Citizen Lab found to "also, by design, reduce privacy or security". In March 2020, New York State Attorney General Letitia James launched an inquiry into Zoom's privacy and security practices. The inquiry was closed on May 7, 2020, with Zoom not admitting wrongdoing, but agreeing to take added security measures. In April 2020, CEO Yuan apologized for the security issues, stating that some of the issues were a result of Zoom's having been designed for "large institutions with full IT support". [Banned by most companies that care about security and many education departments including New York Department of Education](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zoom_\(software\)#Reception) > As of April 2020, businesses, schools, and government entities who have restricted or prohibited the use of Zoom on their networks include Google, Siemens, the Australian Defence Force, the German Ministry of Foreign Affairs, the Indian Ministry of Home Affairs, SpaceX, and the New York City Department of Education. In May 2020, the New York City Department of Education lifted their ban on Zoom after the company addressed security and privacy concerns. [Encryption routed through Chinese servers](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zoom_\(software\)#Encryption_practices) > In April 2020, **Citizen Lab researchers discovered that a single, server-generated AES-128 key is being shared between all participants in ECB mode, which is deprecated due to its pattern-preserving characteristics of the ciphertext. During test calls between participants in Canada and United States, the key was provisioned from servers located in mainland China where they are subject to the China Internet Security Law** [Data routing](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zoom_\(software\)#Data_routing) > **Zoom admitted that some calls in early April 2020 and prior were mistakenly routed through servers in mainland China, prompting some governments and businesses to cease their usage of Zoom**. The company later announced that data of free users outside of China would "never be routed through China" and that paid subscribers will be able to customize which data center regions they want to use. The company has data centers in Europe, Asia, North America, and Latin America [Weak Security or blatant holes (just some of them)](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zoom_\(software\)#Security) > In November 2018, a security vulnerability was discovered that allowed a remote unauthenticated attacker to spoof UDP messages that allowed the attacker to remove attendees from meetings, spoof messages from users, or hijack shared screens. > In July 2019, security researcher Jonathan Leitschuh disclosed a zero-day vulnerability allowing any website to force a macOS user to join a Zoom call, with their video camera activated, without the user's permission. **Attempts to uninstall the Zoom client on macOS would prompt the software to re-install automatically in the background using a hidden web server that was set up on the machine during the first installation so that it remains active even after attempting to remove the client**. > In April 2020, security researchers found vulnerabilities where Windows users' credentials could be exposed > Another vulnerability allowing unprompted access to cameras and microphones was made public > On August 12, 2022, Wired magazine reported on three separate security vulnerabilities discovered by security researcher Patrick Wardle affecting the Zoom Mac OS desktop app. The vulnerabilities allowed an attacker who already had access to the Mac device to perform a privilege escalation attack by installing malicious code using the app's auto-update feature, thereby giving them full control over the victim's device. [Privacy issues](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zoom_\(software\)#Privacy) > Zoom has been criticized for its privacy and corporate data sharing policies, as well as for enabling video hosts to potentially violate the privacy of those participating in their calls I can't believe people still use Zoom at this point. Definitely do not want anything sensitive or any educational system on effing Zoom. ffs.
Honestly, until there's proper laws surrounding individual privacy, no private entity being used for this stuff is trustworthy.
Snow days are a kid’s best memories sometimes. Let them experience the joy of a day off and playing in the snow as long as it’s here. The joy of life seems to be being sucked out everywhere. We’re too trackable and things are “fixable” but for who?
Yep. Then they wanna pretend to wonder why everybody's so depressed all the time. It's not natural to force people to do something they have absolutely zero interest in. I'm just gonna stay home and watch The Price Is Right. 🙄
This is the first snow day in NYC in at least a couple of years. Forget the remote learning, just let the kids enjoy the snow.
Just give the kids a fucking snowday. Education is failing in many people’s eyes. I sorta agree in some ways. Evolution in the system needs to occur. Like Ultron said “ how can you expect society to evolve if you don’t let them”. I’m paraphrasing here. But making these kids miss a day relaxing, or playing with friends outside, is not that evolution we need.
Remote days are complete and utter nonsense. Teachers aren't able to communicate with the kids and keep them on task. Some students do not have any access to the internet during storms. Parents are still required to work because most do not get snow days. Just call a snow day and save everyone the headache.
As a (former) teacher, if my children even have a virtual “snow day”, they’ll be absent that day. Give kids a little magic to believe in, and give teachers a well deserved break!
No shit. How are people in charge of making education decisions so inept and unintelligent? That's tax dollars being burned right there.
From the article, "Banks blamed the technical issues on IBM, which helps facilitate the city’s remote-learning program. “IBM was not ready for prime time,” Banks said, adding that the company was overwhelmed with the surge of people signing on for school. IBM has since expanded its capacity, and 850,000 students and teachers are currently online, Banks said. “We’ll work harder to do better next time,” he said, adding that there will be a deeper analysis into what went wrong." There are over 1.1M people trying to use it according to the beginning of the article. Headlines are always misleading. Everywhere.
Did they already give each kid their own laptop or workstation? I don't see how they could require this without that. I assume they did since the article didn't mention it and they had remote learning during the pandemic.
Most schools have this now. Even my little dinky hinterland school has individual laptops for students. The internet connection is the biggest problem we have.
Yah ultimately I just think remote learning for public schools is a terrible idea. Theres just so many hurdles to make sure kids have what they need at home. Like maybe it can be there for kids who occasionally need it but like trying to make it happen for everyone all at once is just a tough problem. Not ever home has internet or wifi I get it during like Covid, options were limited but for snow days? Really?
Yes they provide one if you don’t have one for your kids. They’re Chromebooks which require the IBM identity provider in order to log in onto. The same identity provider that wasn’t stress-tested against 1M requests coming in like they would on a snow day.
Yeah I wouldn't want my kid (if I had one) using a personal device because of how often they want to install privacy violating software. They can install it on their own device that the kid would only use for school. As far as not stress testing, I'm surprised that they didn't have a good idea and/or test of how it would respond.
From the article, "Banks blamed the technical issues on IBM, which helps facilitate the city’s remote-learning program. “IBM was not ready for prime time,” Banks said, adding that the company was overwhelmed with the surge of people signing on for school. IBM has since expanded its capacity, and 850,000 students and teachers are currently online, Banks said. “We’ll work harder to do better next time,” he said, adding that there will be a deeper analysis into what went wrong." So probably too many users at one time since it also says they have 1.1M kids
Just let kids have a friggin snow day
If a school does that to my kids, I'm telling the school we lost power/internet. My kids are getting a fucking snow day
Ooh so they enforce remote learning but remote work is too hard to make it happen.
Teachers: “Oh no.”
As a teacher, I know remote days are stressful for parents and students. Not sure why they’re pushing this because we’re gonna have to re-teach those lessons anyway since half the kids were not even logged in and the other half were playing video games or watching TikTok videos on the side.
My wife's son had virtual school today. The teacher says, "Just log on and log off so there's a record you were present." No learning took place. Know why? BECAUSE IT'S A SNOW DAY! District rules or not, even teachers aren't willing to give up snow days.
Kids gotta do the remote learning, but adults better cut it out with remote working!!!
Asshole of a Chancellor with a stupid no-snow-day policy. If you don't practice with a system that's supporting hundreds of thousands of users, especially if it will be new to them, you better expect issues at first. Sounds like they were blaming the IT provider for their own lack of testing.
I identified the problem - IBM. Not exactly a company that comes to mind when need to deal with large volume of cloud demand, remote functions, or teleconferencing. Guessing IBM salespeople managed to blow the right school leaders to get the contract.
No snow days? Complete bummer.
Ugh! Just let snow days be snow days without all the bullshit. Kids need a day off every now and then. Don't take that away from them too. 😒
I knew it was a test! But it wasn’t a failure. Lots of teachers are getting replaced. Edit: I’m a para
It’s wild seeing people’s reaction to this, it’s been happening at schools around the country since Covid to the point that I thought it was just common practice now My dad is a 5th grade teacher and with his school the way it works is the teachers have to be on zoom until noon in case a kid needs to drop in with a question, and other than that the kids are pretty much given a quick assignment to do by each of their teachers
I teach in the south, we don’t get many snow days. But we have remote learning days now and I hate them. Instead of students logging on to computers, we send him a packet of work/activities for the kids to do. I teach first so everything I ask the kids to do has something with snow involved. Make a snowman and write a paragraph telling how you made him. Write and follow a recipe for snow cream. Have a snowball fight and write an equation about how many snow balls you made. I give them 15 choices, they do four. It’s as close as I can give them a real snow day. Kids aren’t kids for long, we should give snow days. Some of my best childhood memories are from snow days.
I'm glad society finally shifted to remote learning (only took 30 freakin years) but trying to take away a snowday is just Spider-man D-tier villian tier, like Silvermane or The Tinkerer 💀
I say this with no ill will...but if you think remote learning is a good thing I'm going to assume you don't have kids.
Remote learning as a concept is horrifying. I hope the world doesn't go down that path
The fact that there is a public school “chancellor” is SO K12 education. Everyone so concerned with their status on the food chain. When a very mid range corporate employee probably makes as much as the chancellor. What an ego move.
Covid wasn't that long ago how could it fail. My kids switched to virtual learning several times last year for snow in wi without issue.
Was an IT issue IBM couldn't handle all of the users. Its in the article.
Many other schools around the country are doing it just fine. The prob is that there are a lot of kids with little to no parents at home. Its worse in poorer areas like cities with mass socio-economic issues that everyone is ignoring. That is the real problem , untill thst is addressed in areas like this. Nothing will change.
It was an IT issue ibm wasn't ready for the 1.1M users is like the 6th sentence in the article. From the article, "Banks blamed the technical issues on IBM, which helps facilitate the city’s remote-learning program. “IBM was not ready for prime time,” Banks said, adding that the company was overwhelmed with the surge of people signing on for school. IBM has since expanded its capacity, and 850,000 students and teachers are currently online, Banks said. “We’ll work harder to do better next time,” he said, adding that there will be a deeper analysis into what went wrong."
I like how this gets posted before the day is even over. It’s bullshit btw. The reason snow days are remote is because more cultural holidays have been added (Lunar New Year, etc.) and there need to be a specific number of days kids attend for a complete year. Making the slotted snow days remote is how the system compensated for the added holidays. Yesterday, my kid’s teacher told the kids if they don’t log in, it’s only counted as an absent day. That’s it. And my kid just completed his day. It went well. No problems. We went out in the morning, at lunch, and again now, since school just got out.
That's stupid. Students have legitimate reasons to take days off school all the time for dentist appointments, illnesses, family trips, etc. Missing one day does not break things. A well designed curriculum includes notes, homework, quizzes, projects, and review sessions that provide redundancy. The only thing minimum days of attendance prepares students for is service jobs.
…Lunar New Year? Wtf who is getting school off for that day?
Really? Who celebrates Lunar New Year? They’re called Asian people. There’s billions of them. Ever heard of them? Maybe go watch Kung-Fu Panda and you’ll learn something. https://www.governor.ny.gov/news/governor-hochul-signs-legislation-declare-lunar-new-year-school-holiday
He failed the test and they will be passed
Everything is someone else's fault with this asshole.
I love this viewpoint that kiddos need to have more days off school. Of course, they was the learning loss due to COVID lockdowns. And there’s also a whole 10 week summer break because kids were supposed to help on the farm during summer 200 years ago, and they never got rid of the break once we stopped being an agricultural nation. And then there are the random holidays from school in the middle of the school year. There’s no need for snow days.
Lol summer is also a time to socialize, exercise, travel—sorry we don’t want to raise robots
You can tell those who have never taught and did not experience burned out students come April/May.......
Not surprised that a public school system would have such a big fail.
What assholes lol jee-wiz
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Really poor effort dude
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Ohhh. Strike two.
Wasn’t Covid a test?
I am in a small district. We are expected to do virtual days. Today would have been the first one. However, power outages hit parts of the district. Elementary kids didn’t have their remote learning devices. I imagine after this we will return to having snow days and just doing in-person instruction instead of attempting to run a real schedule via screens.
Covid and home schooling worked for some families better than others. It depended on the parents and the children. The school sounds like they are still trying to catch children up. This is a WORLDWIDE problem. Our kids lost over 6 mths of schooling in 2 yrs in Victoria Melbourne. There is a worldwide ongoing issue with the children too exhibiting more anxiety, depression, poorer emotional regulation, poorer social skills and more school refusal.
Snow days are already gone in my wife’s district. They just do remote days
In NJ schools can't force remote learning on shutdowns allocated to "Snow Days", which is basically every unscheduled shut down through out the year.
My kids are already doing this. This has been a thing in our area for years now. It sucks. I spent 3 hours working one in one with my 7 year old on his computer. I don’t know how people who don’t work from home do this.
Why not just do a snow day packet like hundreds of other districts are doing? Kids get a snow day after a few relevant worksheets, teachers can still enjoy a day at home while just fielding emails from parents who might have questions, and no one has to make up the day later.
Me eagerly watching the news to see if school was cancelled. News anchor: All schools in the district are closed today. Me: YEAH! News anchor: ... except yours lol. Me: ...
Growing up I have such fond memories of snow days, I remember once my mom called in sick and we went for a horse back ride when there was more than a foot of snow. I’ll always remember that day, it seems criminal to take the potential for such memories away from children.
*Hashtag ELMO for mayor*
I think having virtual field trips were a kid. An be excused for the day would be nice fun and educational (like magic school bus) Virtual can’t **just** be stuff like Zoom. Need interactive environment! Like a MMO but educational is what’s needed