It's winter in America. That means most of the country will have to contend with snow and ice.
It also means there is a virtual certainty that, at some point during the winter months, Mother Nature is going to deliver a haymaker of a storm that will dump snow and ice on large sections of the country.
The storm of the century (or maybe it's "The Storm of the Decade" — they haven't quite decided yet) is going to hit the country from Texas to the Northeast, a 1,500-mile path of misery and inconvenience for about 200 million people.
From Friday to Monday, people from Amarillo to Albany will be struggling to cope. Not so our children. Most of them are already praying that Gaia drops enough snow to convince the grown-ups to cancel school for the day.
Unfortunately, New York City elected a socialist as mayor. That means that socialists, being the most humorless people on the planet, will not allow any fun to be had when there's indoctrination and propagandizing to be done. New York City will go to "remote learning" if the snow forces the schools to close.
It means that, "instead of a day of snowball fights and sledding, the city’s kids will be stuck staring at a screen in their bedrooms," writes The Free Press's Will Rahn. Thank God, I missed that innovation in modern schooling.
Growing up in Chicago's suburbs in the 1960s and 70s, there were snow days a-plenty. I don't believe it was any snowier then, but this was an era where moms stayed home while dads trudged off to work. These days, school districts have to gauge the impact on families where both parents work, and there's no one left at home to watch the children.
The "Snow Watch" usually began the previous evening, when weather reports began predicting massive amounts of snow. The question on every kid's mind was, would it snow enough? Should I study for that history test or bank on a snow day? It was a vital question asked by tens of thousands of children as they anticipated a day off. And if they calculated incorrectly, there was always the "thermometer held under hot water" trick to get your mom fussing over you and giving you anything you wanted.
Win-win, right?
Snow days were one of life's blessings. I think the Sisters of Mercy who taught at my Catholic grade school wanted a day off, too. We could be hellions when we put our minds to it. Of course, we didn't torture nuns. We just did our best to exasperate them. The nuns probably sat around playing cards (we heard canasta was their game of choice) and swapping war stories.
New York City schools chancellor Kamar Samuels is adamant. No snow days. They are “a thing of the past," as the last disaster of a mayor, Bill DeBlasio boasted.
That announcement came amid our country’s disastrous experiment with remote learning during the Covid era. The ill effects of this policy were devastating for young children, particularly those who were disabled and otherwise at-risk, as well as their parents. Truancy flourished, with some 41 percent of kids in New York missing at least 18 days of school. Test scores collapsed. Similar stories played out through the rest of the country, even though children were at lower risk from serious complications from Covid.
The powerful teachers unions loved remote learning, however, presumably because it made their members’ lives easier. No longer would a hungover educator need to dust off the school’s VHS to show students a movie in lieu of working. Instead, they could just mute the kids who were asking too many questions over Zoom, and blame a technical malfunction if they elected to stay in bed all day with their camera turned off.
I was already a college graduate when the Storm of the 20th Century hit Chicago and the Midwest. The 20+ inches of snow it dumped on Chicago (after nine inches on New Year's Eve) paralyzed the city and led to the election of an unknown named Jane Byrne as mayor.
The incumbent, Mayor Michael Bilandic, had been appointed by the city council after Mayor Richard Daley dropped dead of a heart attack. In truth, Bilandic was out of his depth. The city came to an almost total standstill. The streets weren't plowed days after the snow stopped. The sidewalks were impassable. Schools were closed for a week. Bliandic told people to get their cars off the streets so the plows could move, a ludicrous request given the road conditions.
The machine pol paid for his ineptitude with a humiliating defeat in the Democratic primary that March at the hands of political novice Byrne. The new mayor went out and spent tens of millions of dollars on snow-removal equipment that would never be used, given that there could be only one "Storm of the Century" every century.
Related: 88 Percent of Students at Two Midwestern Schools Say They 'Pretended to Be More Liberal'
Kids shouldn't be forced to sit in front of a screen, listening by themselves to a lesson the teacher doesn't want to teach and the kids don't want to learn. Best to close the schools and give the children the time to frolic in the snow and just be kids for a day.
