New York City Mayor Blames Parents For Snow Day Remote Learning “Fail”

Are snow days a thing of the past? Ever since remote learning took full effect in most schools across the country in 2020 due to COVID regulations, most schools adapted to e-learning tools.

Kids worked from their desks at home alongside digital lesson plans and Zoom meetings. And now, though kids are back in classrooms, most districts are still using e-learning tools instead of giving kids full days off for weather incidents like snow days.

In my town, snow days are no more. Instead of sledding, hot chocolate, and building snow forts with neighbors, the kids are inside doing digital lessons.

The district calls them “e-learning days” instead of “snow days.” To be honest, it kind of sucks! For a lot of parents, e-learning days just bring back bad memories of COVID lockdowns and frustrated kids trying to learn at the kitchen table bringing the entire family to tears.

Despite the lack of enthusiasm for this new world of learning, there doesn’t seem to be an end in sight. New York City Mayor, Eric Adams, doubled down on this end of snow days for the Big Apple.

At a press conference, Adams defended his decision to discontinue the long-standing tradition that generations of children have experienced.

"COVID took months if not years away from the education and the socialization of our children. We need to minimize how many days our children are just sitting at home making snowmen like I did, and they need to catch up," Adams said while seemingly wearing a $490 Fendi scarf.

New York City's public schools chancellor said the city did not pass a recent remote-learning “test” because of technical issues.

“As I said, this was a test. I don’t think that we passed this test,” David Banks said at the news briefing, adding that he felt "disappointed, frustrated and angry" as a result of the technical issues.

NYC Public Schools did a lot of work to prepare for the remote-learning day, Banks said, but shortly before 8 a.m., they were notified that parents and students were having difficulty signing on to remote learning.

Mayor Adams took this “failure” as an opportunity to blame NYC parents.

“If you are a parent and you are not willing to navigate a computer for your child, that's a sad commentary,” he said during a press conference after reports of a “test” to see if remote learning would work on NYC snow days.

“Clicking on, figuring out how to navigate that, using it as a teaching moment on how to get it online and how to get it up ... Showing our children that difficulties come and we overcome that. That is what it's all about. So you can't tell me that,” he said.

Mayor Adams continued to compare today’s parents to his own mom, who walked him to school with her “arthritic knees” when snow days occurred.

“My mom took me to school with her arthritic knees on a snow day and you are frustrated by lining on to a computer. That's not acceptable to me,” he said.

“That is not the energy we should be showing right now. Our children have to catch up. They need to be engaged.”

Mayor Adams is giving off major “I used to walk to school uphill both ways in below zero temperatures” boomer parent energy here. On days off from school (or remote learning days), most parents still have to work.

So while in between meetings and working on deliverables, parents are also expected to be logging their kids onto Google Classroom and helping them navigate lesson plans instead of bundling them up to go outside to play in the snow or setting up a movie marathon.

On the bright side, New York City Public Schools were the outlier in implementing remote learning during the recent East Coast snowstorm. Hundreds of districts in Boston, Connecticut, Philadelphia and New York were shuttered for official snow days.