Snow Use Complaining

Not for the first time, I'm about to cheese off a lot of people when I talk about the school snow day thing.

First of all, they close schools far too often for far too little snow.  Around here, they even close schools when it's GOING to snow, or for days of heavy rain.  It's true, and what does that tell the kids?

Listen, when bad weather comes along, no need for you to get out and get going!  Just turn your pajamas right side out again and get ready to watch Gullah Gullah Island or whatever all day long.

That's a bad lesson to teach them.

Now, I know what you're going to say - there's a risk, oh a horrible RISK of letting the kids be driven to school in the horrible two inches of white hell that descends from the sky!  Little Egbert or Ursula can't possibly risk life and limb getting on a school bus in such adverse conditions!

So they get on saucer sleds and hurl themselves down hills at 87 miles an hour, careering madly off trees, boulders and other sledders in their descent.

Or seven of them pack into a Corolla and head for the mall.  No risk there, huh?

So we agree, schools should stay open unless there is a blizzard of the magnitude that has the governor appearing on TV wearing a Lands End down vest, appealing to all motorists to stay home at all costs, leaving the few passable roads in the state open for vital traffic such as police, fire, EMS, plows, and television news crews who are there showing people digging out their cars, crabbing about the whereabouts of the plow, bemoaning the fact that we are now getting more snow than Hibbing, Minnesota does, and sticking a yardstick into a snow drift for the touch of science and math.

Keeping the schools open will preclude another sure harbinger of spring around here: the annual rationalization by members of school boards who, every fall, announce that there shall be a finite number of snow days in the school calendar, and that for any day(s) that schools are closed over and above that number, the school year shall be extended into the summer, or shaved off the spring break.

Then at this time of year, just at the same time that hopes are once again aborning in the hearts of Orioles baseball fans, the school boards meet and decide to waive the necessity of making up the excess snow days.  The standard reason is usually something along the lines of, "Well, you know, what could we do, you know what I'm saying to you?"

And this teaches the kids that rules are rules and they are not to be broken no matter what and that's final.  Well, almost.

We will now turn the floor over to responsible members of the education community for their responsible, if logically flawed, reply:

Oops! All out of room on the internet!