Education Shrinkflation

The Appearance of Safety Culture remains the number one go-to for school closures and delays.

Greetings from FMP world! This is my first post in over a year, as I’ve been occupied by other things such as health issues, research and teaching efforts, and another major non-FMP-related writing project. More on that later, as there may be some changes to this page coming in 2026. But in the meantime, as the snow days for my kids add up (we are already on number two), I realize the more things stay the same, the more they gradually get worse.

Every year for the last four years, around the second Saturday in November, my daughter (now ten) has her first gymnastics meet of the season in Bloomington, Indiana, about an hour and a half drive from our house.

In 2022, we left early, while it was still dark, to make it on time for an early start for her level 2 competition. Surprisingly, it had started snowing an hour or so earlier, and there was already a dusting of snow on the lawns, houses, cars, and streets of our neighborhood. It doesn’t regularly snow in mid November in central/southern Indiana, so even a light snow was unusual that time of year.

However, as we drove south towards Bloomington, the snow intensified. In some places, visibility was difficult and traffic slow along the two-lane route. Ice built up on the wipers, and as a result they didn’t clear the snow off the windshield as effectively, making visibility worse.

Nonetheless, we persisted, and made it to the gym in Bloomington on time, with around four inches of snow on the ground locally. I didn’t think the accomplishment remarkable, as I’ve driven in snow before, and although it requires more concentration and patience, it wasn’t impossible in those conditions. But I was very curious to see how many other families with gymnasts were willing to take the risk to drive an hour and a half in moderate/heavy snow for the event, and how many decided it wasn’t worth it, or even turned back.

As we entered the gym, and my daughter began her warmups with her team, I soon had my answer—not one other gymnast on her team was absent, or even late. All were present.

In the normal, sane world of my childhood, this wouldn’t have been extraordinary. But this was November, 2022, and the world was just beginning to recover from the insanity of the COVID-19 response. People in the U.S. had endured harmful lockdowns, restrictions and mandates, and healthy children were targeted despite the almost non-existent risks SARS-CoV-2 posed to their health. Were people done with all the safetyism and harmful, non-science based, virtue-signaling theatrics of the past two years? I was at once hopeful.

Fast forward to another morning later that winter. It had snowed overnight, maybe an inch and a half. At 5 am, we got numerous automated emails, calls, and texts (just to be sure) from the school district administration—school was cancelled. The excuse for the district wide snow day was “some outlying roads are slick and dangerous.”

We live near the center of town. Our daughters’ school was less than ten minutes from our house. In fact, almost any school in our district wasn’t more than twenty minutes from our house. Going to work that day, even at 8 am, it was obvious the local roads were fine. Two hours later, they were dry. Not even remotely as difficult as the 1 1/2 hour drive to Bloomington we had done in November.

Upon perusing local social media posts, my wife and I observed much posturing in parents and teachers defending the district’s decision. Any complaint about the lack of concern for working parents schedules and disruptions to learning was met with the tried and true paeans to safety that had been leveled at any rational person for the last two years. “We just want everyone to be safe!” “What happens if a child is hurt on the way to school?” “The school could get sued.” “Just because you aren’t concerned doesn’t mean other parents shouldn’t be.” Etc, etc. A few more reasonable people made the point that not all the roads were clear, and some places outside of town were worse.

Fair enough. It’s fine to give accommodations for people that live out of town on farm roads that never get plowed, and sometimes the city does a lousy job of plowing roads. I’m fine with that. That’s no different than what happened when I was kid. My house was located at the bottom of a very steep hill. Some snowy mornings, there was no getting up that hill in our rear-wheel drive, gas guzzling 80s sedan. So we missed school occasionally when no one else did, and we made up our work. No harm, no foul.

That case-by-case accommodation scenario, for some reason, is now unacceptable due to a cultural shift. Now everyone goes to school, or no one does.

What had happened to the parents that were willing to drive eighty miles in a snowstorm for a gymnastics meet on a Saturday morning? Were these the same parents that now couldn’t drive, walk, or take a bus 5-10 blocks to school on the morning after an inch and a half of snow, and had only scorn for working parents who thought differently?

It gets worse. Sometimes, the school corporation has two-hour delays, starting school at 10 am instead of 8. This can happen for a variety of reasons, usually because the wind chill is single digits (Fahrenheit). Administrators often cite that buses are difficult to start in lower temperatures. I can’t remember this used as an excuse when I was a kid. Are buses harder to start in 2025 than in 1985? If yes, then why, exactly?

One former superintendent told me too many kids don’t wear adequate coats at the bus stops. “What if we have a charity drive and people donate coats for kids that need them?” I suggested.

“Well, many kids still won’t wear them,” he replied.

“How is that your responsibility?” I wondered aloud.

He didn’t have an answer for that, because administrators don’t know when their responsibility starts or ends. So they just draw the line wherever its most convenient for them and for teachers, and use the Appearance of Safety in their justification. No consideration of what’s best for working parents, or even kids themselves (although they obviously love snow days).

One day in September this year, we had a districtwide two-hour delay for fog. Yes, that’s correct, fog. And don’t be fooled into thinking it was the kind of fog where you can’t find your butt with both hands. It was this (photo taken at 8am, one street from our house, and three blocks from the river where it would likely be the worst):

Are you seeing all the potential for dead kids in this photo? Me neither.

I predict, in the next several years, that the district will have a two-hour delay simply because it is raining hard in the morning, and that I will also continue be a reckless jerk for suggesting that maybe that’s not in anyone’s best interests.

In the summer, a local principal contacted me, because she had noticed that the student absentee rates at her school were still around ten percent, much higher than they had been before the COVID pandemic response. The kids that were missing school didn’t have some chronic health problem. They simply were allowed by their parents to miss school on the flimsiest of pretexts. Teachers were also missing school more frequently than in 2019.

She knew I had served on the school district’s COVID advisory committee, and knew I wasn’t afraid to stand up to the mob, so she wanted my advice, and also was thinking about proposing a committee to address the problem. I told her I thought it was a cultural issue now, and there might not be an easy policy solution. She agreed, but nonetheless was eager to work on the problem. One of her solutions was a refrigerator magnet sent home with all the kids that asked, “When am I too sick to go to school?” It then listed the most obvious things like a fever, vomiting, or diarrhea, and not things like mild cold symptoms or a positive COVID test. That may have shaved a percentage point or two off of the absentee rates, but there’s still some work to be done.

About two months later, when the district announced a two-hour delay because of fog, I sent her an email where I wrote that “The difficulty of getting absentee rates back down to pre-pandemic response numbers gets compounded by tacit messages from school administrators that school just isn’t all that important.” She replied that she would “pass the message along.”

If kids should place their education as a high priority, the messages and actions of administrators, teachers, and parents they observe should clearly reinforce that importance. Using the Appearance of Safety as a convenient foil to avoid responsibilities and making hard decisions undermines that message completely. Just because public education isn’t paid for directly like gymnastics competition fees doesn’t mean it should get a pass. Otherwise, we will continue to accept less and get less value, and our kids will pay even more for our carelessness in the future than they already have.

And finally, if the school district is going to have a snow day, then let it be an actual snow day, not with some annoying pretense of an education via e-learning. We all learned how useless that was in 2020-21, and we shouldn’t forget that lesson. If the kids must be home, then they should be outside, sledding, having snowball fights, and building snowmen, not inside on screens!

That’s more like it!

Feel free to leave your own ridiculous school closure stories in the comments!