New York City public schools will pivot to remote learning Tuesday amid forecasts of up to 8 inches of snow, Mayor Adams announced.
But it will not be a typical snow day. Students are still expected to log onto online classes during normal school hours with their teachers or complete assignments from home.
“We need to minimize how many days our children are just sitting at home making snowmen, like I did,” Adams said during a storm briefing Monday in lower Manhattan. “They need to catch up.”
Since the pandemic, the city has experimented with remote learning as an alternative to canceling school during weather emergencies. At the end of the last school year, a few hundred thousand students moved online as the air quality deteriorated from Canadian wildfires, while the rest of the school system already had a scheduled day off.
Education officials have also been running simulations of remote days, Schools Chancellor David Banks said. After years of light snowfall, Tuesday will put the nation’s largest school district’s preparedness to the test.
The early notification a day before is likely to help. The city’s dozens of local school district superintendents were informed of the plan before 10 a.m. and took to notifying their staff. Banks said they were in the process of alerting parents while the noon press conference was underway.
“In order to do this effectively for a school system this large, you need as much time to prepare and to be ready, and to let parents know so that they can be ahead of the game,” said Banks.
The Adams administration faced heat for not shuttering schools during the peak of the wildfire smog, as well as substantial flooding earlier this school year that evacuated one school and required cleanup in hundreds of others.
The chancellor said he spoke with both the teachers and principals unions, and “everybody said this is the right call to make.”
Still, the announcement was not without its detractors who question the quality of remote instruction or the loss of the traditional snow day.
Banks explained the school system has to follow state law of 180 days of instruction, and Tuesday will still be an “exciting day” when kids can enjoy the snow.
“By 3 o’clock, the school day is over,” he said. “We don’t want the kids to not have fun. I’m not a grinch. But we do want them to be able to be actively engaged in school and get the most out of it.”
All Catholic elementary schools in Manhattan, the Bronx and Staten Island will have a traditional snow day with no remote learning, a spokesman for the Archdiocese of New York said. Catholic schools in Brooklyn and Queens are run by a different entity.
A winter storm watch is in effect from the early morning Tuesday until the evening commute, with 40 mph winds expected, city officials said.
So far this winter, New York has logged just 2.3 inches of snow, or roughly the same level of accumulation as all of last season. The city broke a 700-day snow drought last month, when just over 1 inch of flakes piled up.
