Rumors of snow days and questions about schedule changes were spreading across the Backer Memorial this past Tuesday and Wednesday. With the possibility of a snow day looming, and with SLUH teachers and students becoming more proficient in learning remotely, principal Ian Gibbons S.J. and his staff decided the time was ripe for updating the school’s snow day policy. 

As announced in last weekend’s Parent Connect email, snow days will feature asynchronous work, with teachers assigning work via Canvas and no synchronous class meetings. Students can complete work on their own time, giving them the chance to do other things that may come with a snow day.

Gibbons and other faculty began to look into the update when SLUH first began online school last year, citing new technologies that would allow for improvements.

“With our pandemic response, all the technologies we put in were to allow us to more seamlessly support (remote) education,” said Gibbons. “We now have the tech to do it.”

The group first had to decide which structure they would go with when deciding the new protocol.  The first option was a standard snow day, where school is out and no homework is assigned. The administration also looked at different options of synchronous classes, but decided against it, citing unneeded complexity. 

“Those options got really complicated, and just keeping it simple in the pandemic is important,” said Gibbons.

Instead, a decision was made to go with an asynchronous schedule, where assignments are given via Canvas and there are no set class times. This decision was made after realizing that, with the craziness and chaos associated with communicating snow days and family situations, synchronous classes were no longer feasible. 

“A big concern for us was families. You don’t know whether a sibling’s school is open, or having transport problems, or running last minute errands, or the other hectic things that come with a snow day,” commented Gibbons. “Plus, we have a lot of our faculty and we want to support them.”

This schedule also comes with the added benefit of students being able to stay home and enjoy the snow during the day.

“That is such a big part of snow days and why they are so great,” said Gibbons. “They are just fun.”

The new snow schedule will seem very familiar to any returning students, who took asynchronous classes to close out last year’s fourth quarter. 

“It is precisely like last year’s asynchronous, except that it is not all seven classes in one day, but rather the classes you would normally have on that block day,” said Gibbons. 

While having classes on a snow day may seem like a monumental change, or a crime against some unwritten snow day code to some, it is important to note that SLUH has had a similar assignment-based snow day schedule preceding this new change.

“Pre-pandemic, faculty would contact their students and direct them to Canvas and stuff. They were still making forward progress on their classes,” explained Gibbons.

As with the last snow day procedure, snow days that go unused do not take days off the end of school, as students are still able to learn from home. 

“We are a private school, and therefore don’t have to have specific ‘snow days’ built into our scheduling like public and charter schools are required to have,” explained Gibbons. “We did build the schedule on the assumption of something like four possible snow days, but whether we have them or not does not affect the overall schedule.”

So next time all that flushing ice cubes down the toilet and checking the weather forecast every five minutes pays off, make sure to allot time for some schoolwork between the sledding and resting up near the fireplace.