BSM should have more snow days to prevent car accidents
Instead of opting for late-starts, BSM should be using online school.
BSM students use Powerschool Learning (formerly Haiku) to work on school assignments during snow days. However, BSM doesn’t have as many snow days as it should.
The first time BSM had an online school day was in the winter of 2014 when we had a string of severely cold days that kept us indoors. At the time, I thought it was an interesting solution to an unavoidable situation, and I hoped that online school days would become more popular when there was too much snow or the weather got too cold. Sure, you technically aren’t at school, but teachers post enough information online that it’s easy to teach yourself, and they make sure to respond to emails quickly so you can also ask questions. In my mind, it fixes the issue of dangerous cold or road conditions perfectly.
However, in the time since then, BSM has rarely utilized online school days, instead opting to either use late starts or just make kids go to school. I understand that online schools days should not be a go-to solution to bad weather, but the safety of students should always be a priority. When school was canceled on Monday and it became apparent that the snowstorm was going to come later, I assumed we would just be forced into two days of online school. I mean, the forecast was essentially the same; it was just pushed back a day. Instead, we were given a two-hour late start that gave little time to plow all of the roads and allow time for traffic to die down. This in itself is worrying because car accidents are the number one cause of death for teenagers, and having dangerous road conditions only make this problem more likely.
The worst part of this is that it is relatively easy for BSM to avoid this scenario. Rather than dealing with bad road conditions, students could stay home and complete an online day of school. The problem becomes worse when we opt to have a late start rather than just a canceled school day. Expecting teachers to change lesson plans hours before school starts and account for classes that are reduced by 15 minutes is absurd and leads to wasted days. If we cancelled school, this allows more time for teachers to formulate a lesson plan that could, in theory, last a full 40 minute class period.
