Every year when there is an alert for a big snowstorm in Lake Forest, students cross their fingers and engage in goofy superstitions like flushing ice cubes down their toilet and putting a spoon under their pillow, in the hope of a snow day.
What many don’t realize is that there is a lot that goes into deciding whether or not to cancel school.
Illinois state law requires public schools to be in session for a minimum of 176 days. As a result, schools try to avoid taking snow days in order to prevent adding days at the end of the year.
One way of avoiding a full snow day is instituting a late start. Those who defend this position argue that late starts are convenient because they do not cause loss of an entire day of school. Additionally, a late start allows time for the roads to be cleaned for safer driving conditions.
However, a late start causes a series of inconveniences. If school cannot start at the normal time, it would be smarter to cancel the entire day.
For one, a late start can be a serious burden for some parents. For parents who don’t work from home, getting their children to school can already be time-consuming even without a late start disrupting their schedule. Adding a last-minute change is inconsiderate to those who do not have the ability to drop what they are doing and take their kids to school at a later time.
This is especially disruptive when the decision is delayed until roughly 5 a.m. on the morning of the prospective snow day—which is how the last LFHS late start was handled. Although the beginning of the school day mirrors the start of many workdays, school snow day policies do not translate into the real world. Just because someone’s kids start school late does not mean they can adjust their work schedule (especially at 5 a.m. on the morning of).
Parent Rachel Whidden shared an example of this inconvenience from last week. She is a professor at Lake Forest College and had classes scheduled all morning, making her unable to drop off her daughter at the designated late start time. The only available solution was to take her daughter to school during her lunch break. However, this would cause her daughter to miss her first two periods of the day.
Luckily, her husband had a last-minute opening in his schedule so he was able to take their daughter on time. However, not all parents will be that lucky.
In addition to inconveniencing parents, a late start shortens classes so much that they are hardly worth attending. For LFHS’s last late start day, classes were shortened by 15 minutes. This may not seem like a big reduction, but students were left feeling unproductive and out of sync.
For many students, starting the school day later threw off their momentum and made it difficult for them to stay focused. They believed that it would have been better if the whole school day had been canceled.
In the future, the school should decide to cancel school altogether or leave the normal start time. Taking the middle ground and having a late start should not be an option.
