Many of us have had the experience of waking up early, checking the school’s website (or, in times gone by, listening to the radio), and hearing that our school was closed for the day due to inclement weather. A true Manitoba school day has often been met with whoops and hollers of joy, especially if the temperatures were moderate enough for us to play outside.

Those days may soon be at an end.

Some Manitoba school divisions are working to initiate remote learning on days when schools have a weather-related closure.

Closures Create Challenges

On Wednesday, February 2, the HSD sent an email to parents thanking them for their “understanding and cooperation on winter storm or cold days when student safety and division policy necessitate cancelling school.”

With online learning being required at some points during the pandemic, and for various lengths of time, most schools have had the chance to put in place remote learning procedures. They’ve become considerably more experienced at running online classes for students of all ages—although how successful they’ve been is a matter of debate.

The pandemic also introduced another challenge—having to cancel classes in order for staff to organize, ensuring that lesson plans, technology, equipment, and learning supports are all in place.

The result is that students have lost a lot of learning days in the past two years. This year’s escalating number of snow days doesn’t help.

According to Shelley Amos, interim superintendent and CEO for the HSD, their schools have been closed six days in January alone, which is the most snow closures in 15 years.

“Other divisions ended up being a little bit different, but for us, it’s definitely a record going back as far as 2007,” Amos says. “In 2013 to 2014, we had a period of five days we were closed, and in 2009 we also had five days. But we also know there is more winter left to come.”

Closure Criteria

Each time schools close due to weather, decision-makers are met with a unique set of challenges.

“It is complex,” says Amos. “It depends on where you live. You might live across the division, or you might live en route from Steinbach to Niverville. The weather conditions vary across the division, so that makes it difficult for one person to make an informed decision. We have staff out on the roads early in the morning to see what road conditions are like. We network with each other within the division and with contacts in other divisions to see what they are experiencing. It’s a very complex decision.”

She adds that they have observed that at times road conditions are better in some areas than others, but the current HSD policy demands that any closure apply to the entire division as a whole.

“We are going to have a conversation to review the policy, as we do when we review policy on a regular basis, to decide if that is something we’d like to continue or make a change at this time,” says Amos.

This year, the decisions were made even more complex by the high degree of fluctuation in storm conditions on a single day, combined with the need for lengthy snow-clearing operations which sometimes lasted well into a second day.

According to Amos, this is due in part to the large number of rural students served by the HSD and the variable conditions faced by bus drives on remote country roads.

“Along the gravel roads, there were long, hard drifts that were impassable by school bus,” she says. “We will always make the decision based on what is safest for our students and bus drivers—and if the conditions are not safe, we will close. But no, it’s not a day off for staff. There are expectations for our staff. They are reassigned to work from home and all have been issued devices. There’s some prep work, collaborative meetings or staff meetings, planning meetings that can take place.”

Parents Left to Scramble

The sheer number of school closures this winter has left many parents to scramble for childcare. For some, frustration has been running high. And when sunny days follow storm days, many parents wonder why the schools must remain closed.

On social media, parents raise other questions. Such as, are schools perhaps closing for another reason? For example to mitigate against COVID-19 exposure due to the sharp spike in cases over the Christmas holidays? After all, when the province made the decision to delay the return of school following the winter break, the reason given was to prevent or delay COVID exposures in children and staff due to the sharp rice in Omicron cases.

“I will definitively say, there is no decision being made to close schools related to Omicron,” Amos says pointedly.

Simon Laplante, the assistant superintendent of the Seine River School Division, says that he has fielded the same concerns.

“It’s absolute nonsense,” says Laplante. “COVID has absolutely nothing to do with this. I reject that notion that we are closing more or that we are closing schools because of that.”

On one snow day, Laplante says that he made the decision to close the school and he received upset emails and phone calls from parents who didn’t agree with the decision.

“I closed the schools that day because the weather conditions were very obviously bad,” he explains. “Then the next day, because the roads were still passable in some areas, I got phone calls that the schools should not have been closed.”

Another day, Laplante elected to leave schools open because the temperature was below the closure threshold in some areas, but not in others. Like the HSD, the SRSD covers a large geographical area with a lot of variability.

“And I got phone calls from parents then as well,” he says. “What people don’t realize is there’s an aftermath to these storms. The main road may get cleaned up pretty quickly. It’s another matter for the back roads, the gravel roads. Most of our rural parents live on those gravel roads, and driving a truck or driving a car is a very different thing… The centre of gravity of driving a bus is much higher than driving a car or a truck. If you get a bus stuck in a snowdrift, or sliding, it becomes absolutely unsafe.”

Keeping schools open is important to Laplante, who acknowledges there is always an element of stress for parents when the schools do close.

“Teachers and the superintendent, we understand that snow days are a real burden to parents,” he says. “We’re very, very aware of that. I’m very sensitive to that.”

Preventing Learning Loss

While students may rejoice at not having to attend school on snow days, educators see a growing problem related to lost classroom time.

Adding extra days to the end of a school year is not a solution made at the school or divisional level, although it could be instituted by Manitoba Education as a whole.

Divisions could also individually consider turning staff in-service or professional development days back into learning days, but the HSD says that they are not seriously considering this. Instead they are working on the idea of preparing remote learning options that could be implemented on short notice so that students can continue learning despite snowy or cold weather.

“If we have another snow day here or there, we are looking at whether we can flip our system to be remote for the day,” says Amos, “knowing that it may not work for everybody.”

Amos admits that this idea comes with challenges, like ensuring that students have access to equipment and the internet. Staff also need time to convert lesson plans to work well online.

“All of our teachers have Hanover devices issued to them,” she explains. “Many of our Grade Nines and up have Chromebooks. The younger ones don’t, so we wouldn’t mandate it. But we feel the older ones have the capability to check in with their teacher. Our teachers, they are very conscientious and diligent to reach out to their students and I think some of that happened during recent snow days… It is doable.”

She adds that the experience of remote learning during the pandemic has equipped schools more than ever before to consider these options.

“Remote learning during a snow day wouldn’t really be a new experience, but it would be a new system,” says Amos. “COVID has forced our teachers to quickly learn how to implement remote learning well. Many younger students have access to an app called Seesaw that our teachers are using, and many parents have expressed appreciation for how well that works.”

The division, of course, recognizes that there are connectivity issues in some remote areas, and some families don’t have the necessary devices. Therefore, it wouldn’t be 100 percent mandatory.

Laplante says that the Seine River School Division is working on the same idea.

“There has been some talk about that,” says Laplante. “It’s not ready to go. We’re still in a conversation stage… Winter is not over. It could be useful. We are keeping our eye on the month of February.”

Laplante acknowledges that enacting remote learning on snow days would require teachers to have online lessons ready to go with very little notice, which necessitates a different type of planning.

“Effective remote learning needs to be planned ahead. It’s not something you can do one day on and one day off,” he says. “Snow days go against that notion, because snow days are unpredictable.”

When schools conducted remote learning this year after the winter break, Laplante points out that the SRSD’s teachers had two days to plan for it.

“So that’s the challenge right now. If we are having more snow days, we are looking at ways that teachers can connect with their students, or teachers could prepare some work that could be done at home and [figure out how to] support that type of online learning at home that day,” says Laplante. “But we would like to avoid the notion that the teachers need to be able to have something ready the morning of without any notice. We want to avoid that.”

SRSD’s remote learning plan for snow days may only be in the early stages, but Laplante sees the potential.

“We have lost so many days, and that is not beneficial to students,” says Laplante. “How can we connect with the kids? How can we support their learning? We are having these conversations with our leaders.”

As is the case with the HSD, Laplante agrees that it wouldn’t be their first choice to remove professional development days from the school calendar. He says it is very important for teachers to have those opportunities.

“That’s when the staff gets together and learns a new approach or new strategy. To me, that is fundamental to our education system,” says Laplante. “The kids today are very different than the kids 50 years ago. There are different values, different lifestyles, different challenges we must be aware of, such as about climate change, gender diversity, and all of these things… teachers need to constantly learn and improve their strategy. That’s why these professional development days are very important.”