Are schools essential?

Snow day decisions reveal the truth

Here in Fairfax, the snow started falling late Saturday night. By Sunday morning, six inches had already piled up, with sleet and freezing rain adding more throughout the day. It was a real storm, and the cold stuck around.

School was canceled first on Monday, then on Tuesday, and then again on Wednesday. We had pre-scheduled teacher workdays on Thursday and Friday, so our kids got a full week off.

By Tuesday I was starting to get cabin fever. I had shoveled, but I hadn’t otherwise been outside of the house. So I went for a walk around my neighborhood. And I was surprised at how bad things were. But they weren’t universally bad.

Let me explain. My family lives in a townhouse. We’ve lived here long enough to endure 2 of the 10 worst D.C. area snowstorms of all time. It’s a large complex of townhomes, and our snow removal contractor did a particularly crappy job of clearing the streets this year. So I was feeling pretty grumpy as I navigated entire streets left unplowed.

But then I walked past a nearby apartment complex. Their parking lot was cleared, as were their sidewalks. That was different…

And then I got to a nearby strip mall. And you know what? Their parking lot was clean. People were out shopping and working. The shelves at my local grocery store had been restocked after the panic buying in the days leading up the storm. There were mountains of snow piled up, and the shoppers were bundled up, but otherwise things looked… pretty normal.

Here’s the bottom line: In the wake of a snowstorm, some people were back at work almost immediately. Some parts of society continued to function normally. Starbucks was open, but the schools were closed.

It reminded me of COVID all over again, when the truly essential industries had to find a way to keep operating. And public schools, despite all protestations otherwise, continued to act as if they are not essential to our daily lives.

Shovel your sidewalks!

While I’m on this rant, you know what else had me dismayed? The sidewalks. As I walked around, I estimated that about half of my neighborhood’s sidewalks were left shoveled. Or, worse, people cleaned a straight line directly from their house to the street so they personally could get to their car, but they left the sidewalks completely covered. Those turned into several inches thick of solid ice.

Some of my neighbors shoveled a straight line out of their house to the street. You can’t see the sidewalk—it’s buried under snow and ice.

One reason the schools can’t open is because of situations like this. My kids couldn’t safely get to their bus stops without going out into the street.

There’s a little bit of a chicken-and-egg problem here. Fairfax County Public Schools serves 180,000 kids over an enormous swath of land, and there are parts of the county where conditions are more treacherous than others. (Or that’s what I hear.) The result is a district with a reputation for being extremely weather-averse.

But these things feed into each other. Why bother to shovel the sidewalk if you assume the schools will close anyway? Who cares?

I feel like a crotchety old man when I write about stuff like this. But community norms matter, and I think we could all be just a bit better off if we treated schools, sidewalks, and shared responsibility as things that actually matter.

Reading List

Yours truly: Charter schools make up a disproportionate share of reading “Bright Spots” in NYC

Schusterman Foundation: How to build strong readers, writers, and thinkers

Matthew Levey: Why Curriculum Reform Needs More Than Decoding

Michael J. Petrilli: School choice supporters keep moving the goal posts

SC Post and Courier: Don’t double private school funding without seeing if it works