Gee and Ursula ask, are snow days priceless memories or wasted opportunities?

Taken from Thursday’s edition of the Gee and Ursula Show.

With a transition into remote learning now an established alternative to in-person schooling, snow days might well soon become only a nostalgic memory.

Tacoma Public Schools is deliberating whether or not to do away with the practice all together. They have reached out to their communities to ask whether or not parents would support remote learning as an alternative to regular schooling when inclement weather makes safe commutes impossible.

KIRO Radio’s Gee Scott is not having any part of it.

“I’m hot as fish grease. It is on like Maddie Stone. I cannot stand this whole thing. This is bad,” he declared.

“I want to take it back. I want to take all of you back. Remember when you were in school, and you woke up in the morning — you looked on the news, and they’ve got their scroll going through, naming all the schools that are going to be out.”

“Do you remember that feeling that you got, when you saw that you had no school? It was a snow day. That is the best thing about life,” Gee said. They can’t do this to kids, man. They can’t do this.”

“Nostalgia aside, I want to bring some real thoughts in here,” co-host Ursula Reutin added.

“With what is happening, with tomorrow being a school day off and all the people upset about that, the kids are already behind,” she noted. “They lost so much, and now you’ve got the technology, the ability to continue to learn while you have this inclement weather.”

“If you really have snow days where people can’t get around, but you have the ability to continue to teach, why wouldn’t you do that? Millions of dollars were spent trying to get it so that we could have this option, and now you’ve got this great option,” Ursula said. “I mean, it’s not the best option, but it is an option so that they don’t lose more school days. Why wouldn’t you use it?”

“I agree in certain circumstances that falling back on remote learning might be beneficial,” guest and Tacoma News Tribune columnist Matt Driscoll conceded.

“If it’s going to be an extended week out of school, then maybe you fall back on that, but what I would say is we know that only some children, some families have the ability to fall back on that easily,” Driscoll said. “However, for many families, particularly here in Tacoma, we know that’s not the case.”

“If we’re replacing a day of in person instruction with remote learning, we know from our experience that a number of kids and a number of families are getting left out of that,” he said. “It doesn’t sit right with me, mainly because we know who gets left behind when we do that.”

Listen to the Gee and Ursula Show weekday mornings from 9 a.m. – 12 p.m. on KIRO Radio, 97.3 FM. Subscribe to the podcast here.