I have a Snow Day today. (It’s a weird one: there’s no new snow on the ground or in the air, as of 7am…but 4-6″ and 40mph winds are anticipated later.)
Snow Days are sudden threats: you can’t prepare and mitigate them in advance, and you can’t stop the weather. We’re good at reacting to sudden threats.
We are now living in the 22nd month of major disruption due to the COVID-19 pandemic, and our reaction is completely different than it was 22 months ago, when the world shut down.
It should be different. We know more: we know how to slow the spread, we know how to treat the illness.
But it’s still a threat, and it’s still imminent, even though it’s no longer sudden. With the omicron variant, it’s very imminent, and my guess is that I’ll be doing my own round of treatment for the illness in the next two weeks or so. That is because we aren’t good at dealing with ongoing threats. We’ve all gotten so used to knowing the threat is there that we don’t really want to take precautions anymore, as a society. (I know that this varies geographically…my community is the type where a grocery shopper wearing a mask might be greeted with “Let’s Go, Brandon” by a fellow shopper.)
In terms of precautions, most of the school districts in my area have ended all mask mandates, leaving us with mitigation strategies that we know won’t help. (“Try for social distancing!” “Extra cleaning at night!” These won’t mitigate the spread of an airborne omicron variant.)
If we had had 4-6″ of snow every day for 22 months, 4-6″ wouldn’t be enough for Snow Days anymore. We’d adjust, and we’d get kids in school. But we’d do it by managing the snow: getting better equipment for moving the snow, making sure our kids all had and wore boots and snow cloth, building better infrastructure to prevent power loss, putting better tires on our buses.
We know that school is integral for our kids. Less for the “learning loss” that everyone is talking about than for the “social loss” and for the kids who are struggling at home. But declaring “No more Snow Days” and doing nothing to mitigate the challenges of the falling snow is an incomprehensible decision.