Denver Public Schools is opting not to snow on students’ parade, closing down all schools on Monday due to severe winter weather despite the prevalence of remote learning during the coronavirus pandemic.
The school system made the announcement to families on Sunday after students threatened to revolt at the possibility of canceling snow days.
“Monday will be a traditional snow day with no in-person or remote learning,” the school system said. “If there is an extended stretch of severe weather this week and we are not able to safely allow students to attend in-person school for multiple days, then we will switch to remote learning starting on Tuesday.”
Denver, which is in the midst of a historic winter storm that could result in some parts of Colorado seeing up to 4 feet of snow, modified its snow day policy on Wednesday so that schools would experience a “traditional snow day, with no in-person or remote learning,” when facing “severe weather that is limited in duration.”
The storm, which is affecting Colorado, Wyoming, Nebraska, and South Dakota, is the largest the region has seen in 15 years.
Before the change to the school system’s snow day policy, local students expressed outrage after Denver schools opted to go fully remote in late February instead of canceling classes due to a storm that dropped more than a foot of snow.
Charlie Carabetta, a fifth grader who said he urged his entire class to gather at a local sledding hill and protest remote learning, lamented how a turn to remote learning led to a loss of snow days.
“It’s unfair that since COVID, it ruins social interaction, and now, it’s ruining snow days because we have to be online … and we have 180 days of school. It wouldn’t hurt if we miss two or three, right?” he told 9News.
Schools across the country are moving toward reopening more than a year into the pandemic. Officials in New York City, Chicago, and San Francisco, among others, have taken steps toward returning students to classrooms in recent weeks.
Still, other institutions have moved toward prolonging remote learning, with Duke University issuing a new stay-at-home mandate for all undergraduate students on Saturday night in an effort to curb transmission of COVID-19.
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COVID-19 has infected more than 29 million people in the United States, and more than 530,000 deaths have been attributed to the disease, according to the Johns Hopkins University coronavirus tracker.
