Blizzard Bags, the Bane of Parents Everywhere

As I mentioned in an earlier post, this winter has been ridiculously cold and snowy, and we've had more than our fair share of missed school because of it. Yesterday was our eighth calamity day, which took our grand total for the year (so far) up to five days more than the school had allotted. Anything over those three days planned days, and the children are supposed to make them up at the end of the school year.

In an attempt to get around this, there has been legislation in Ohio to add extra allowed calamity days "just this once" since it has been such an unusual winter and it's screwing up everyone's schedules something fierce. At first, it looked as if this might be the solution we (parents, teachers, and students) had all been hoping for. It passed the Senate but then it got stuck in the House and hasn't moved anywhere for nearly three weeks. I'm sure there are legitimate reasons people oppose it, but one of the reasons I read claimed that teachers would be paid for work they are not doing. Ha! You have GOT to be kidding me. Don't even get me started on underpaid, underappreciated teachers!

So, moving on to Plan B. Apparently, in 2011 someone proposed the idea of the Blizzard Bag, and it passed legislation. It is basically a packet of schoolwork for students to do at home when there is another canceled day of school. We can use up to three of them and have each one count as a make-up day instead of having to tack on extra days at the end of the year. The children have two weeks to complete each packet. Sounds like a wonderful idea, right?

WRONG!

Blizzard Bag #3 -- a.k.a. Mommy Torture!

Clearly, the person who proposed the Blizzard Bag idea never had children. Quite possibly, they have never tried to teach a child. Certainly, they have never tried to teach MY children, especially when they'd rather be outside building forts and throwing snowballs at each other.

Each Blizzard Bag packet is about nine pages long. Each page requires approximately three questions from each child. That's three Blizzard Bags, times nine pages each, times three questions per page, times two children. That's approximately 162 Blizzard-Bag-related questions. That doesn't even count the 500 times they each asked if they could take a break, or go to the bathroom, or get a drink of water, or one of a million other things they came up with just to get out of doing their work. That's like 1,162 questions! Snow days are exhausting.

Here's an idea. How about we take that money that we're saving by not paying those horrible, undeserving, free-loading teachers, and write every parent a Blizzard Bag check instead. Believe me, we've certainly earned it.