My first class of the day in school is English. It’s usually a pretty quiet class, being at 7:25 in the morning, but for those of you with an astute eye, you might’ve noticed that something was different this past Feb. 2, 2022. My class of usually 30 students was missing 10 students by the end of the period, but that wasn’t nearly as unusual as the fact that I had arrived at my class nearly forty minutes late. After I took my seat, I watched two more students arrive even later than I did. This was because there was over four inches of snow piling up on the roads leading to Neuqua Valley and all of the other schools in the Indian Prairie School District (IPSD).

The day before was filled with anticipation from Neuqua Valley students as the weather forecast (rather inconsistently) predicted that 5-12 inches of snow would fall overnight, leading many students to rightly believe that in-person school would be canceled. My dad came into my room at around 6:00p.m. and told me that he just heard that schools in Plainfield, Oswego and Riverside had announced their plans for an E-Learning day. And yet as the night went on, I kept checking my Gmail, Single Sign-On and the IPSD Twitter for any confirmation that we would be having an E-Learning day. Eventually, I just went to sleep, hoping to wake up the next morning to a message announcing that students wouldn’t be coming into school. I woke up before my alarm and immediately grabbed my phone to check.

“Student drivers – be safe driving to school this morning!”

This was the tweet that had been posted by IPSD that morning, and it quickly garnered a large backlash from IPSD parents and students alike, with over 850 replies posted in less than 36 hours, many of which criticized the decision as well as the tweet’s tone. Metea Valley senior Julyssa Andrade commented that the tweet seemed “almost sarcastically written” and that it was “such a slap in the face to staff and students.” The fires of frustration in the community were fanned even further when an email sent by IPSD Superintendent Adrian Talley the night before surfaced. The email, sent in response to a student asking if in-person school was to be canceled or not, was widely considered to be a condescending and inconsiderate dismissal of a student’s concerns, and some angry students retaliated by starting #FireTalley and even creating Twitter accounts pretending to be and mocking Talley.

These initial reactions don’t even mention what the actual drive to school was like. Neuqua junior Ethan Lopez, who rides the bus to school, said that “the morning was a problem because the roads hadn’t yet been cleared fully. I’m the last pickup stop on my bus, and I ended up standing out in the snow for ten minutes after my pickup time to show up almost twenty minutes later than usual.” Neuqua junior Julie Ruggles, who drives her own car to school, described that “the roads were really poorly plowed; some roads didn’t even have salt or plows at all. The conditions were just really dangerous.” Even worse, there had been rain before the snow started the day before, which left a layer of ice underneath the snow. For me, the drive from my house to school took nearly an hour, and there were multiple reports of stuck cars and accidents on the roads—all of which could’ve been avoided had school been canceled.

One of the biggest complaints about the decision to keep schools open amidst an active snowstorm was that IPSD had been touting remote learning as an alternative to a snow day well before the beginning of the 2021-22 school year. The Winter Weather section on the IPSD website details all of the factors that the superintendent takes into consideration before making the decision (data from the National Weather Service, checking that the buses and electricity and heating systems are working properly and discussing with district administrators, city officials and nearby school districts), but many felt that these options were blatantly disregarded. There were plenty of school districts in the area that had announced a snow day to be made up at the end of the school year like Springfield School District 186, Joliet Public Schools 86 and Bloomington School District 87, while other districts, like Peoria Public Schools District 150 and Valley View Community Unit School District 365U, opted for the intended E-Learning day. The conditions of main roads, parking lots and sidewalks were visibly hazardous, especially since snow plows had not covered every street at a time that early in the morning.

The decision to not go for a remote learning day was more than just a disappointment for 204 students; for those who forewent the precarious roads, they missed out on a whole day of work. In my case, I nearly ended up staying home that day, but I had quizzes in physics and precalculus, which, if I stayed home, I would’ve had to make up the next day (when I also had quizzes and tests in two of my classes, which was too large of a workload for me to miss). Many students’ schedules were disrupted as a result of their decision to stay safe.

“[Keeping school open] actually disrupts learning until at least Friday,” wrote Neuqua teacher Jason Verdin on Twitter. “Work that could have happened remotely today was not assigned because students are not responsible for work if they are called out of school, which means tomorrow’s lessons aren’t going to work if they are based on today’s lessons.”

For a while, it seemed that E-Learning would replace snow days, but after that hectic day, it seems as if snowstorms won’t matter one bit under this current administration. The action (or lack thereof) taken on that day by IPSD was frustrating and how similar situations will be handled in the future is up to the district.