Sunday, January 23, 2005

Late for school

We've had a pretty good year so far with the snow days here in our little northeastern city. Our former superintendant used to cancel school if there was a rumor of snow anywhere in an 100 mile radius, but the current holder of that office requires that there actually be an appreciable number of flakes on the actual ground before disrupting everyone's routine. This is much appreciated by parents, but not so much by teachers, who had become accustomed to days off and no bad commutes. The current school day has seen a few flurries but no snow days, and over the past week, I heard not one but two teachers trying to enlist students in an effort to get one -- in one case, by advising pupils to go to the superintendant's house and demand one, and in another ordering kids to perform a "snow dance." Whether either of their efforts had any influence I couldn't say, but we did get a regular dumping of snow over the weekend, and we do have a "delayed opening" tomorrow. "Delayed openings" are, I suppose, a sort of compromise, halfway between a snow day and a normal one. But in my parental book, it's still disruptive, and I still have to make all those class parent phone calls. I hope the teachers are at least satisfied, though I suspect this will just encourage them to come up with better demands and dances.

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