Snow days are one of every student’s favorite things. However, the excessive amount of snow days has become a problem for both students and teachers at Yutan High School.
“In my 20 years of teaching at Yutan, besides 2020 of course, while we’ve had some other years with a heavy amount of snow days, we’ve never had anything that I can compare to the concentration of days off that we had this past year,” English teacher Ginger Eikmeier said.
With a total of eight full days off and four late starts just for weather-related reasons, along with an additional two days cancelled for school activities, junior high and high school students are cutting it close to not reaching their instructional hour requirements. This is especially true for the seniors because they are already dismissed earlier than the rest of the school.
“Seniors are probably one of those things that’s really important because you’re finishing everything up, some of the…college-level classes that you need that background in order to be successful when you leave here,” superintendent Rex Pfeil said.
As a result, seniors will be staying two days longer than planned but are understanding towards the situation.
“At the end of the day, it doesn’t really make a difference because we’re graduating that week anyway, and we still get out way before the underclassmen,” senior Britney Zeleny said.
Because of planning ahead, the rest of the school is still above the minimum requirements.
“The minimum should never be the target…We should always be way above that to excel in things, and so all school districts are way above [the minimum] because we know things like snow days, early outs, things like that, are going to happen,” Pfeil said.
For Eikmeier, the missed days have interfered with her tightly planned schedules.
“It’s definitely made scheduling a challenge because I have my lessons pretty planned out from the beginning of the semester, so when I lose that many days, then I really have to rethink, ‘How are we still going to get all of this material covered?’” Eikmeier said.
As a result, teachers might need to make sacrifices in their classes.
“We’re seeing classes that are either speeding up or maybe choosing to drop some pieces that may not be a big priority at that point,” Pfeil said.
These adjustments include reducing the number of problems or tasks or even getting rid of them altogether.
“Sometimes there’s just small activities or assignments (that) while they are enriching maybe are not as critical to student mastery that just get omitted, or maybe they’re a little repetitive,” science teacher Leslie Heise said.
Although it may be possible to cut some assignments or activities out of some classes, for others, like Journalism, that isn’t a possibility because the same publications need to be completed, so students need to be more mindful about their work time.
“Our workload doesn’t change,” Eikmeier said. “We just have fewer days to do it, so I think that just really means we need to be more focused when we’re in class to make sure we can still get all of those things done.”
Journalism students agree and understand the need to utilize their time.
“We have to be more efficient with our time since we were set back a few days because of the time off,” senior Alexis Pehrson said. “It will be more difficult, but we’ll get it done.”
Overall, being open-minded and flexible during the last weeks of school are the best ways to work around this challenge.
“I think just understanding the time squeeze and just working together to make sure we have a plan moving forward to know that we’re going to get it done,” Pfeil said.
