Rhode Island could turn to virtual snow days

NORTH SMITHFIELD, R.I., (WJAR) — Cartoons, hot chocolate and snowball fights: for some, snow days in southern New England can be a thrilling escape from reading, writing and arithmetic. In fact, they might even make your superintendent break out into a rap.

But could snow days be a thing of the past?

North Smithfield Superintendent Michael St. Jean has been tossing that idea around for years. When the coronavirus closed schools and districts had to submit distance learning plans, he wasn’t sweating it.

“I think it was on a Thursday morning, the commissioner said, ‘OK, everyone, we need your distance learning plans.’ Within an hour or two, we had submitted ours, which was largely the original one from two years ago, updated for today,” St. Jean said.

The superintendent submitted the school district’s plan to the Department of Education in 2018. Legislators had passed a law a year prior that allowed for remote learning days, should school be canceled due to inclement weather or another emergency. Sen. Roger Picard, a Democrat from Woonsocket, said he was motivated by the many lost school days caused by blizzards and other snowstorms in early 2015. The virtual days could be used a maximum of three days per academic year.

With his background in technology, St. Jean was confident North Smithfield could make it work.

"Let us try it, let us pilot it, let us see what works, what doesn't, what we need to improve and then let us share this information with the other districts,” St. Jean said.

RIDE requested more details and clarifications, and St. Jean pulled the application, believing the efforts were futile.

“I don’t think the Department of Ed, again, at that time, was ready to take that leap,” he said.

The state took the leap in March, closing school buildings temporarily. Before the announcement, North Smithfield began an ‘exit plan’ of sorts.

“We were already preparing that Friday at the end of the day to have the kids empty out their lockers and take home textbooks, just in case,” St. Jean said. “In fact, we issued old textbooks that we weren't using.”

In mid-April, RIDE released revised distance guidelines, which recommended schools adopt a pass/fail method. Gov. Gina Raimondo announced the remainder of the school year would be conducted remotely April 23.

Throughout the spring, concerns were raised surrounding equity and regression among students with special needs.

Still, Raimondo and Education Commissioner Angélica Infante-Green praised the efforts of school personnel, parents and students statewide.

RIDE spokesperson Pete Janhunen said the state is “moving in the direction” of turning snow days into distance learning days, but the plans are not finalized.

It’s a “very real possibility,” Janhunen said in an e-mail, and RIDE is “ironing out the details.”

The jump to remote snow days would be an “easy lift” for North Smithfield, St. Jean said.

Roughly 98 percent of North Smithfield students have access to the Internet, he said. In cities like Providence and Central Falls, that percentage is much lower. It took weeks and hundreds of thousands of dollars to get most students online.

St. Jean acknowledges distance learning comes with challenges. Some, major.

“We’re building in flexibility for various situations that our families are in: we have two parents who may still be working so you don’t have that parent support at home, maybe the child is being dropped off with an aunt or an uncle or a neighbor,” St. Jean said. “Or we have parents working at home, but they are working at home and can’t be with the kids the whole time.”

Virtual snow days would allow the district to meet the 180-day requirement and are more “efficient and effective,” he said.

“The amount of learning that happens in June is not as intense as the amount of learning that happens in January,” the superintendent said. “It's hard enough to keep the kids on task into June; summer is right there outside of the window. It's sometimes a brutal 90 degrees in the classroom.”

President of National Education Association Rhode Island Larry Purtill believes there is a place for distance learning after the pandemic.

“When this is over, we ought to take a look at this how works, how we can make this work for snow days and how can we look at maybe a student who sick out sick for a month, how can we use distance learning and what’s going on in their real classroom as well?" Purtill said.

Teachers, parents and guardians with questions regarding distance learning can call a helpline for support.