“Snow day” is a magical phrase for most students, a day of rest, wintry fun and freedom from the structures of school.
2025 started off with a flurry of snow days and bitter cold that kept students across West Virginia home for days at a time. As we’ve seen this week, the threat of cancellation is far from over this winter.
Although they may be a necessity for safety, administrators don’t take closing schools lightly. There’s learning loss at play, but also a complex logistical dance to be executed.
Justin Boggs, deputy superintendent of operations and support for Cabell County Schools, said there are many steps to determine if schools stay open, can get away with a delay or need to close. That begins with talking to meteorologists at the National Weather Service, sometimes two or three times in a single day if a big storm is forecast.
“Of course, the weather is not always going to do what is predicted, he said. “We’ve actually got seven employees that actually go out and drive roads. We usually start around four o’clock in the morning.”
Those employees pay particular attention to bus routes, driving them in advance of students to assess their safety. They also focus on the secondary roads families and staff may have to traverse. Boggs said Cabell may be known for its urbanity, but administrators have to keep the entire county in mind.
“There’s a lot of the district that is very rural as well, a lot of one lane roads,” he said. “The main roads may be fine, but the secondary roads may be impacted by this.”
Boggs and other administrators said that in the best case scenario, they would be able to make a call the night before, to give staff, students and their families time to adjust come morning.
But in 2025, a snow day may not mean what it used to. In the age of connectivity and school-allocated digital devices, school districts can now enact what are called non-traditional instructional days. Boggs said a combination of both online resources and more traditional paper and pen packages can keep students learning at home.
“Face-to-face learning is going to be absolutely the best option for the students,” Boggs said. “But under the circumstances, when you’ve got weather for multiple days and we don’t have a lot of power outages, we will use those non-traditional learning days, or those remote learning days for those days.”
Justin Hough, director of communications and child nutrition for Preston County Schools, said snow day remote learning are called “brain freeze” days in his county. He and Boggs both said schools are allotted five non-traditional learning days, which both counties have already exhausted for the year. Hough said West Virginia’s schools have learned the lessons of remote learning in rural communities from the COVID-19 pandemic.
“A lot of times we’re able to see this in advance. ‘Hey, we got a big storm coming in on Thursday,’” he said. “A lot of times what our teachers will do is they will actually have all of the students download their brain freeze one, brain freeze two, brain freeze three folders. So that way they have offline access to be able to accomplish each of those tasks at home.”
But because so much of the county is rural, there are also instances where students cannot safely travel by bus but staff can still come in on a delay, creating a unique remote learning opportunity.
“They have open office hours for a two hour-time period where they are able to meet online with a student,” Hough said. “They can take phone calls. They can do it in (Microsoft) Teams, or we will allow students to actually come into the school they can report during that time.”
Nutrition is another point of concern when students are out of school. According to Feeding America, more than 1 in 5 children in West Virginia live in a household that is food insecure. Without adequate access to food, children are at risk for health problems, obesity and nutrient deficiencies, which compound struggles to focus in the classroom and exacerbate difficulties with learning.
Over 67% of school-aged children in the state qualify for free or reduced-priced meals. Hough said there is no requirement to offer meals to students during alternative learning. But having students come in on snow days is one option for addressing nutritional needs.
“A county like Preston made that decision years ago, that on these alternative learning days, we were going to open our doors and anybody that can come in, student-wise, would be able to be offered a hot meal,” he said. “That’s actually at whatever your closest community school is.”
That means students attending the county’s sole high school can go to the elementary school down the road and still be served a meal. But given the harshness of this winter, with students being out sometimes for several days in a row, Hough said the county is looking at other alternatives to ensure nutritional needs are being met.
“What we’re looking to do moving forward is very similar to during COVID,” he said. “Rather than do those hot meals, we’ve actually found a company that we’re going to be contracting out with in the future that does pre packaged, shelf-stable meals that meet the USDA nutrition requirements.”
He said such an arrangement could also help address a similar issue for another season, what advocates call the “summer feeding gap” and the challenges of feeding students when they are out of school for weeks at a time.
Keeping an eye on winter, however, Hough re-emphasized the complexity of calling a single snow day, let alone multiple, while maintaining the safety and state Department of Education standards.
“These decisions are made first and foremost with our student safety in mind, then with our staff safety in mind,” he said. “But then also trying to still continue to adhere to those policies that the WVDE has set out for us, And to also be respectful of our parents’ times and our parents’ plans.”
Even before winter weather moved back into the region this week to disrupt even more instructional days, most districts in West Virginia had already used up both their allotted alternative learning and snow days on the snowstorms and cold in January.
Both Cabell and Preston have already planned on making up a day of instruction. And while students keep their eyes to the skies for more snowflakes, staff and administrators will keep theirs to the roads for a few more weeks of winter.
