When I was a kid in the 1970s, no words broadcast on KDKA radio were sweeter than: “Bethel Park School District — closed.”
The moment we heard them, we threw on our snow gear and headed for the sled slopes, determined to squeeze every free second out of a stolen weekday break.
Most kids in New York City will never know this rite of passage.
Sure, Mayor Zohran Mamdani shuttered schools on Monday, Jan. 26, because of snow — but he also mandated that children attend classes remotely, using a multi-million-dollar virtual learning system the city built in 2021 during the peak of COVID.
“It’s not going to be a traditional snow day — that is a determination we’ve made,” said Mamdani, slipping into the third-person gobbledygook socialist Democrats use when they’re really saying “snow days are an inconvenience for me!”
Across the border in Connecticut, meanwhile, school districts from Greenwich to Vernon took the opposite approach.
They preserved snow days because, said one superintendent, “kids should be kids.”
The truth is, children need snow days now more than ever.
Modern children live under constant adult supervision, rigid schedules, standardized expectations with their faces buried nonstop in electronic screens.
Psychologists have long argued that unstructured play — enabled by snow days — is critical to healthy development. It builds independence, creativity and emotional resilience.
Psychologists also note that remote instruction often amounts to token assignments and attendance checks, accomplishing little educational value — yet it still counts as a required school day, which is all the bureaucracy cares about.
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Working parents get a raw deal, too. They must rearrange schedules, monitor attendance and make sure their kids are logged in and compliant — no small feat when you consider NYC’s system crashed during a snow storm in 2024.
Of course, NYC’s policy isn’t designed around the needs of children or families. It’s designed around the needs of the bureaucracy.
State law requires NYC — just like Connecticut and many other states — to complete 180 days of school each year.
One or two snow days shouldn’t be a problem, right?
Wrong. It poses a huge problem for the NYC school bureaucracy.
First, the teachers’ union doesn’t want its late-June vacation plans to be disrupted by a single added day.
Second, calendars and testing schedules must be reshuffled and buses rescheduled — extra work for bureaucrats.
Third, century-old agricultural rules — kept firmly in place by the teachers’ union — forbid starting the school year before Labor Day, a week after most school districts begin nationwide, which limits snow-day flexibility.
Fourth, over the past decade, inclusive NYC has added three new school holidays — Eid, Diwali and Lunar New Year — to recognize Muslim, Hindu and Asian communities. Though the intent is well intentioned, it again limits snow-day flexibility.
Thus, if Mamdani were leader enough to issue a snow day, he’d have to deal with forced makeup days in late June, teacher union grievances, disrupted testing schedules, summer vacation conflicts and labor negotiations with everyone from school-lunch servers to school-guard staff.
Add it all up and here is the key takeaway:
The bureaucracy will always do what is best for the bureaucracy — to hell with the NYC kids, who will never experience the raw, unplanned joy of a glorious snow day.
Find Tom Purcell’s syndicated column, humor books and videos of his dog, Thurber, at TomPurcell.com. Email him at tom@tompurcell.com.
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