Why do some Kansas City area school districts call snow days, but others teach remotely?
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With snow, ice and bitterly cold temperatures, Kansas City area schools closed their doors on Friday for the third day this week.
Some districts have held typical snow days, allowing students to kick back and take the day off. Others, though, have kept students at home but still required them to log in to virtual classes. A few districts have done both.
And parents across the Kansas City metro have asked, why is that?
Districts mastered quickly pivoting to virtual classes during the COVID-19 pandemic, and they also provided all students with laptops or Chromebooks to learn from home when needed. After months of school closures, both Missouri and Kansas placed new restrictions on remote learning.
Missouri schools
In Missouri, districts are now granted 36 hours (about five school days) of alternative instruction, such as remote learning, when schools close due to weather or other emergencies. Those days count as regular school hours, so districts don’t have to make up lost instructional time by tacking on extra days to the end of the school year.
When districts decide to implement remote learning, teachers either prepare online lessons or send students home with packets of assignments.
On Friday, some Missouri districts, like Blue Springs and Lee’s Summit, opted for a remote learning day. But others, including Kansas City Public Schools and Independence, held regular snow days. Some districts, like Raytown, used both regular snow days and remote learning days this week.
The choice comes down to how districts build their school calendars to meet the state’s requirements for instructional hours, said Katy Bergen, spokeswoman for the Lee’s Summit district.
Lee’s Summit has decided to use all of its alternative instruction hours first, holding five remote learning days when there’s inclement weather. Then it would “revert back to traditional snow days if we hit a sixth inclement weather day,” which would mean adding days to the school calendar.
Some districts have built make-up days for inclement weather into their calendars, so they’ve went ahead with regular snow days this week. Remote learning days take planning, requiring teachers to plan ahead and send students home with assignments or laptops, so the traditional snow day can be an easier option.
Kansas schools
In Kansas, area districts are largely sticking with regular snow days when students can’t make it to school safely.
The state allows a student to receive up to 40 hours of remote education during the school year, including for weather or other emergencies. Districts do have plans in place to pivot to virtual learning if needed but are mostly saving those restricted hours in case of an emergency.
“Remote learning is something that, to do it well, takes a significant amount of planning and preparation that you’d really want to have done in advance,” Shawnee Mission spokesman David Smith said. “For teachers to have everything, for children to have devices at home, that takes a fair amount of planning. We’ll have snow days when we need them.”
On days like Friday, when schools didn’t call off until early in the morning, Smith said that switch to remote learning would have been especially difficult.
“Our hope was that we would be able to have more days of school this week than we actually had,” he said. “This morning was a case where at 4:30 a.m. when staff was out, there was significant black ice on our parking lot. We didn’t think we’d be able to address that by the time school started, so we had to make the decision at that point.”
This story was originally published January 12, 2024 at 12:41 PM.
