Mayor Eric Adams had finally permitted the first snow day on February 13th of this year, since entering office in 2022, and despite previous planning, the response it had from students and guardians alike was not supportive of the turnout. Students were instructed to join their classes online according to the regular bell schedule and to do any work assigned by teachers. Since many foresaw students not signing on meetings or only passively participating, and as a result many teachers assigned “busy work” and didn’t teach anything new. 

One anonymous mathematics teacher, like many others, only assigned an Edpuzzle for her class to complete. Many students were assigned worksheets and many weren’t able to sign into their meetings due to WiFi issues. Many other teachers and students across the city were having issues logging into their DOE accounts, causing distress to ensue as people didn’t know how to fix the problem. Eric Adams addressed this issue in a media briefing later that day, “If you are a parent and you are not willing to navigate a computer for your child, that’s a sad commentary… That’s not acceptable to me, our children must learn: they fell behind. We need to catch up. That’s what we need to be focusing on.” Mayor Adams argued that students need these snow days, even with the technical difficulties, since quarantine impacted student growth. In the face of technical difficulties, parents are expected to be responsible for rectifying them. 

According to Mayor Adams, these online snow days prevent children from falling behind, even though most teachers couldn’t or wouldn’t teach anything new. A senior in the IB Career-Related Program had this to say about our most recent remote snow day, “I don’t think the remote school day was necessary because it was a lot more trouble than it was worth. Both teachers and students were having issues with Google Meet and Zoom so by the time people logged on, a lot of time was already wasted. Not to mention, students didn’t learn much from the one day at home when schools could’ve simply waited for the following day to resume classes.” Numerous students did not see remote snow days having any purpose due to the lack of work and lessons learned, but there are still some individuals who think that kids need this day to not fall behind on their schoolwork.