When extreme weather hits, our schools get it wrong.  There’s a lot of winter left. Last Monday’s widely disparaged non-snow day for public school students was not Mayor Mamdani’s fault. Even a recurrence before spring will be the result of the pre-determined school calendar not of his making . But next year ordering remote instruction instead of a day off will be his responsibility. It’s time to reset this policy that cynically prioritizes school day bean counting over actual learning.  In past decades, rare snow days were a welcome respite for New York students and their families. To make up for the lost time, extra days were built into the school calendar to meet the state’s 180 instructional day requirement. This was a common sense solution since research shows that snow days do not impact student learning and keeping schools open during that time is detrimental. More recently, though, Mayors Bill de Blasio and Eric Adams upended the arrangement of built-in snow days by adding East Asian, Muslim and Hindu holidays to the calendar’s prior mix recognizing Christian and Jewish observance. Adding the new Juneteenth holiday, the result is goodbye snow days (or flood days), hello Zoom school as a stopgap to meet the state quota. Needed in-person instruction is further reduced through a state-endorsed loophole allowing schools to use two professional development days toward the 180, though students have the day off. This dilution of our kids’ education must end. Mamdani and the new chancellor, Kamar Samuels, need to restore sanity and integrity to the calendar. We need more productive school days, not fewer. The 180-day rule is just a cost-saving measure to conserve state financial assistance to school districts and is insufficient to meet learning needs. A 2024 Brown University study unsurprisingly found an “overwhelming positive and significant effect” of increased instructional time on student achievement. We worry about student chronic absenteeism but by increasing the number of school holidays and replacing snow days with remote instruction, city schools are promoting absenteeism through a system-wide calendar that intentionally limits attendance!  Accepting that all families need not observe others’ religious holidays might be one source of resolution. These days plus mandated state and federal holidays now checkerboard the calendar, creating severe issues of continuity as well as quantity. One way to address this might be to engage an interfaith committee of clergy to agree that some religiously based system-wide holidays be eliminated from the school calendar. It is understandable that in this case, as in other circumstances, some families will feel pressured to send their children to school rather than engage in observance. But chancellors regulations continue to require accommodation of these students’ and teachers’ need for religious absences, including protections against scheduling of high stakes tests or other unwarranted conflicts.  If elimination of some holidays is legally proscribed or too unpopular, the only other solution is to expand the school calendar, most likely before Labor Day when districts across the country and many New York charter schools are already open. This school year, Houston started school on Aug. 12, Chicago on Aug. 18, and Washington, D.C. on Aug. 25. Success Academy, New York’s largest charter school operator, started on Aug. 11.  Next year, Labor Day falls especially late, on Sept. 7, leaving Mamdani an entire week that month to introduce pre-Labor Day school to New York’s public school classrooms. Since summer camps have already closed, most families would not be unnecessarily inconvenienced by the change. The main impediment would be union agreement, a difficult but not impossible challenge for the new administration to overcome. If those complaining about the loss of a day sledding with their kids are serious about their concerns and if we are all serious, as we should be, about remote instruction replacing in-person learning, then it is time to act by restoring snow days to the school calendar. On the campaign trail Mamdani himself bemoaned the lack of snow days. Unless that was just a snow job, he must now solve the problem. Bloomfield is professor of education leadership, law, and policy at Brooklyn College and The CUNY Graduate Center. ...read more read less