Our church primary school has only shut for one day during the recent snowfest and that was because ice was making the pavement outside and the access inside the school almost impassable. Yay for them I say – well done those dedicated teachers who’ve driven in through difficult conditions to come and educate our children. But there have been many grumbles on the school gate about it being open. People seem to be full of doom and gloom about getting their kids in.
I’m trying to work out if their attitudes about to going to school in the snow are normal or are only normal in an area where people’s emotional capacity is already stretched by everyday life, making the extra hassle brought by snow just one thing too many. Here are some of the things I’ve been hearing:
- We should stay off school when it snows because I or the children might slip on the way to school and get hurt
- We should stay off school when it snows because the children might slip over or get cold during playtime because the teachers send them out to play in the snow
- We should stay off school when it snows because the other schools are off
- We should stay off school when it snows because it’s snowed
Have you heard anything like this where you live?
Actually, I was slightly hoping for another day off today because I had a home school experiment planned. I was going to see if the kids would do some studying for me if I set the day up like a normal school day with break times and games and things. It all seemed possible because we tidied the house yesterday for our Open House.
But looking at the weather forecast, I suspect that proper school is back now for the rest of the snow season, so I’ll have to save that experiment for another time. In the meantime it doesn’t look like the school’s (already bad) absenteeism rate is going be looking up this term.
The Vicar's Wife 
My grandmother once told me about a time it snowed when she was about the same age as the Queen is now. She was a farmer’s daughter, so the walk to school involved a long-ish driveway and then another couple of miles along the road. When it snowed, there were no such things as snow ploughs or gritting lorries. You either dug a path or waited for it to melt. So when she came down one morning to find a deep fall of snow, she was told that she wouldn’t be going to school that day. Her response was not quite what one might expect: she was so disappointed not to be able to go to school that she began to cry. At this point her father decided that if she wanted to go to school so badly, she should, so he put on hi boots, lifted Gran onto his shoulders and carried her.
The school I work at closed for one day last week for similar reasons- ice was making school really inaccessible. The response from our very middle-class parents was the exact opposite. Lots of complaints about school being closed (without a thought for teachers who were struggling to get in to school from a fair distance away), and I suspect because it spoilt the plans of all the ladies-who-lunch!
Our school didn’t close at all. We told all the parents that school would be open for the children but equally that, particularly for those making journies to school by car, they needed to decide for themselves whether the journey was worth it. We live in a very rural area and all but our main road (and our main roads is a ‘B’ road!) were completely untreated.
We only had one day when we had very low numbers and so we took the children to the school field for a snow-ball fight.
The decision to close rests with myself and the Head and sometimes it can be difficult to make the right judgement but our philosophy is that as long as we can get at least the minimum number of staff it, then we open and if we only get a hand-full of children so be it.
We even opened our doors to a neighbouring school one day last week. Although they have the same attitude as us and were otherwise open, their heating completely packed in and so they really had no choice but we were happy to invite their children into our classes.
Many of the schools that our older children attend closed because their grounds were deemed unsafe – but guess what those children were doing when not at school – playing sliding and skidding on the pavements, hardly that different!
I think, as with most things in life, if you want to do something you will. Just depends how much you want to.
Our son’s school was open every day, which given that the snow in SW London wasn’t more than an inch or two is not that impressive, but some of the other local ones did close.
I would have been very pleased if they had closed though. As we would then have had the window of time needed when the snow was suitable for building a snowman in the garden.
I guess it will have to wait until the next time the land of snow and ice visit’s our faraway tree.