Cancelling Classes

As a child, there is nothing like waking up in the morning and being told by your parents that you have a snow day. Realizing that you have no school, you leap for joy as you run back upstairs to jump back into bed. But in our childhood glee, we probably didn’t think about why these free days were given to us. Looking back, it’s obvious—there was too much snow on the ground for anybody to drive safely from home to school. This is a somewhat common occurrence at many day schools, but you may have noticed that Exeter hasn’t cancelled a day of classes in years. This is precisely because Exeter is a boarding school and getting to class presents fewer safety hazards than at day schools.Considering whether or not to issue a snow day in day schools generally boils down to a few questions. Can students make it to school safely in the weather? Can enough faculty make it on time in order to run today’s classes? Is the campus a safe place to inhabit until it’s time to leave?At Exeter, a majority of the students and a reasonable number of the school’s faculty live on campus. Since the walk to classes is at most a six-minute affair, the difficulty of a student getting to class is drastically reduced. The snow-clearing facilities on campus make it easier to walk around, and the only thing you’d probably need to worry about on a typical snowy day is a snowball aimed at the back of your head. The first question is therefore mostly eliminated. The number of deans and faculty on campus is sufficient enough to teach classes and oversee the safety of the school (a scenario that happened recently when most of the Latin teachers were stranded in airports during the snowstorm). This eliminates the second concern of day schools.This does not, however, solve the problem for day students and faculty who live off-campus, who must drive to reach campus. Often, conditions are unsafe and the school allows these individuals to stay home for a day if they need to. Yet just because a teacher does not show up for class, does not mean that they cannot contribute to teaching their class. There have been many instances where a teacher has not been able to attend a class due to medical or other reasons, and has assigned an assignment for the next day via email or notes, or provided a substitute teacher to take over for that one day, resulting in minimal disruption of the class.Also, with the trade-off of Saturday classes for a shorter Thanksgiving this year, we are getting a large net gain in free time during the term. Even during days when the school needs to take time off of classes, such as MLK day, we have always balanced it with Saturday classes on the same week. There is a certain balance the school has between its free days and classes. Most likely, if a snow day were to happen, we would have to make up the school hours one way or another. Without this, snow days would just be another Principal’s Day, undermining that one special day where there are no consequences for the missed classes. It is not the case that we have never made changes to the schedule because of the extreme weather. During Hurricane Sandy’s time in New Hampshire for example, the Academy took measures to ensure the safety of its students and faculty both on and off campus. Certain guidelines were set for those off-campus, and classes were set to begin at 10 a.m. However, this was a rare case, and in general the school’s policy is to remain operational regardless of the weather.While the safety of Exeter’s students is valued greatly, the fact that we are a boarding school allows us to overcome problems with the weather more easily than day school can. We are tough enough to handle these problems. Many people complain that our refusal to cancel classes is simply an attempt to maintain our reputation, but I contend that it is almost never necessary to forgo an entire day of learning simply for a snowstorm.