My Corner for Education

I got some spare time to set up my blog this afternoon! I was actually sent home from school early because of a major snow stormarriving this afternoon. I am grateful that my colleagues were ableto spare me for the last half hour, so I could leave early. It tookme more than an hour to get home. The snow storm was wicked when itstarted. I was sitting in the staff room at about 12:55p.m.duringmy lunch break when the snow began to fall. By 1:00, it was comingdown full force with poor visibility and strong wind. My studentswere quite happy to stay in the portable for recess, because wewere building popsicle houses for our structures and stabilityscience unit. We decided to make it a fun day and build houses,because only twelve students showed up for class today. The news ofa snow storm with freezing rain has been broadcasted over thetelevision and radio since last night. The weather was actuallycalm and nice this morning. Our school board cancelled the schoolbuses this morning because they are concerned about the drive homein the afternoon. The part that really irks me is that some of ourstudents don’t come to school whenever the school buses arecancelled. Our school is one of those so called “walking” schools.We don’t even have school buses! We only send students on buseswhen they are on a trip or with broken legs! Most of our studentsfrom kindergarten to grade five live within walking distance, onlyfive to ten minute away. It might be dangerous for buses on theroad due to road condition, but our students should be able to walkto school. I really think that some parents are lacking parentaldiscretion. As a matter of fact, in a typical morning like today,our secretary would be bombarded with phone calls from “concernedparents” to see if the school is open. I always tell my studentsthat if I can drive for one hour to get to work in the snow, theyshould be able to walk five minutes to go to school. The schoolboard may be concerned about the safety of children on buses (orthe liability issues), but they obviously doesn’t care about thesafety of teachers and staff who also have to drive on the sameroad as the buses do. The problem is whenever buses are cancelled,the schools are still open, which means we teachers have to be inschool. That is why a day like today is totally waste of time,because half of the students would be absent and the regularprogram would be interrupted. We ended up had a great day though. Ithink my students love days like today, so we can actually enjoysome creative activities as a small group. As they pointed out, theabsentees “missed out” all the fun things we did, and yes, theydid!