COLORADO, USA — Many school districts in Colorado decided to do away with snow days during the pandemic, opting for online learning days. One student in the St. Vrain Valley School District is petitioning to bring snow days back.
“Before COVID we had snow days, so why can’t they come back now that we are back to a more normal year,” Finley Mowat, 5th grader in the St. Vrain Valley School District, said. “Snow days don’t happen a lot in Colorado, so it’s nice to have them every once in a while. So please give us our snow days back.”
He’s been trying to bring snow days back since the district replaced them with online learning days. He wrote a letter to district leaders but didn’t get a response. So he showed up to speak at a school board meeting. And he has an online petition.
Finley said the work assigned for online learning days is just a waste of time.
“It’s not really the work that we were meant to do, like if we had a normal day we’d do different stuff,” Finley said.
His mother agreed and added that “it’s just busy work.”
The district set out to solve a problem when schools were out due to COVID-19, but Finley said the solution no longer works.
DPS students won their snow days back after Charlie Carabetta staged a sledding hill protest with his friends.
“I logged onto my classroom. I told my entire class that we should go to the sledding hill, and we should protest for no online school on snow days,” he told Next with Kyle Clark that day.
“It’s unfair that, since COVID, it ruined social interaction, and now it’s ruining snow days because we have to be online.”
Carabetta’s fight to return to snow days went viral online, with support from Campbell’s Soup, Weather Channel anchor Jim Cantore and former NBA player turned Twitter video personality Rex Chapman.
St. Vrain Valley School District could be next, thanks to Finley, and the 9NEWS Next team has decided to take his side.
Snow days are not a policy -they're a shared community value. We're pro-snow day.
SUGGESTED VIDEOS: Full Episodes of Next with Kyle Clark
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