Winter comes with a common New England tradition, snow days. The quintessential New England experience is adored by students and is highly anticipated when there is an upcoming storm.

But what goes into a snow day? The Gator sat down with Head of School Judith Guild to find out what students can expect this winter. 

What factors go into a Snow Day? 

[We look at] where the [current] school closings are, and if they are outside or inside of 128. When you start seeing numbers around 250, you know that Brimmer might be in the mix. So when a storm is coming, I don’t even get anxious about calling it if I don’t see those numbers starting to creep up. The other thing I would do is call Head of Maintenance Tom Bray, and just say, ‘What are you thinking, can you clear the sidewalks?’ [In that case], ice will get us faster than snow. it doesn’t have to be for the snow.  Sometimes, it’s just pure ice.  

In your opinion, are snow days an important part of growing up in New England? 

Yeah. I think we all do right now. After COVID, we started talking about remote days and I felt pretty strongly that kids need to have one or two snow days, just as part of being a kid. [People think snow days] are for lower school kids, but I think everybody in high school benefits. When we had that really bad winter where you had snowstorm after snowstorm, that was getting to the point where we would go to promote learning. I think I put in the handbook either two or three snow days with warrant remote days thereafter.  

How is a late start or an early release decided?  

If the snow is going to stop and the sun’s going to come out and it’s not a lot of snow, that’s one indicator for a delayed opening and then the early cancellations are when the snow starts late morning and it starts to come down.