One of the biggest questions facing our school board is whether we should still have remote school on snow days. I believe that we should still have school, but we should do it all asynchronously. The reason I’m suggesting this is because the snow could affect people’s WiFi and make it difficult to be on Zoom. Still, a snow day wouldn’t mean getting rid of a school day because we would have to add an extra day in the summer anyway. Therefore, I believe that snow days with only asynchronous classes would be a nice compromise between a synchronous option and no classes at all.

One of the reasons that I think we should have completely asynchronous school on snow days is because of WiFi and the inconsistencies that can come with it. Assuming that there was a huge blizzard outside, the snow would affect tons of people’s WiFi. This means, for some people at least, that connecting to Zoom would be a big issue. What if a teacher gets kicked out of a Zoom while teaching their students? What if a student gets kicked out while their teacher is  giving an important announcement? This would cause a lot of unnecessary stress. If we did all our work asynchronously, students could move somewhat at their own pace. This would mean that if someone’s WiFi did happen to go out, it would only be a small issue, because they wouldn’t be in a live class where they could miss something important.

Now you may be thinking, “why don’t we just have a snow day with no school?” Well, I believe that school should be run asynchronously on snow days because otherwise, we will just have to add an extra day on in the summer anyway. It seems strange to spend our summer working when we could do our work now while we are already facing bad weather. Plus, since there would be no Zoom calls, the asynchronous day would feel like a snow day anyway. By handling snow days the way I’m proposing, we won’t have to add additional school days in the summer, but we also won’t feel the pressure of being on Zoom all day long with unstable internet. 

In my experience, every time it is heavily snowing outside, I notice my WiFi slows down. Things take longer to load, my internet goes on and off, my screen freezes, etc. Though the snow may not be the main cause of this, high winds and extreme cold have a huge impact on internet speed. One of the other main reasons internet connectivity worsens during snow storms is high user traffic caused by more people working from home who are relying on their internet to get things done. With the estimated 200 million people already using Zoom each day, adding another large amount of people to that number would cause thousands of people to get kicked out of their Zoom calls. I believe that we could avoid that problem altogether by implementing the solution of asynchronous snow days.

Those are the main reasons why I think we should have all asynchronous classes on snow days. This way, teachers will still get to teach, but it will be less stressful. Plus, people will have more free time.

All views expressed in this article belong to the journalist and do not necessarily reflect the views of the Ottoson Insider.