October 28, 2020
Dear Parents & Guardians,
This letter is being sent to share the school district’s approach to snow days this winter. There
has been discussion in area districts and I wanted to clarify AOS 47’s position for the 2020-21
school year.
We are going to use snow days as we have in other years and cancel school for the day for
multiple reasons. In a hybrid model students have reduced in-person instruction and exchanging
an in-person day for a remote learning day further reduces their in-person instructional
opportunities. With all the online learning our students have been engaged in, these occasional
breaks provided by nature seem as if they should be just that, a break. Many snow days bring
some power outages so that moving forward in a curriculum would leave students and
households out of the day’s learning.
The AOS 47 calendar has built in our typical six snow days again this year for school
cancellations due to inclement weather. You will receive the same notifications that we have
used in the past when we announce a snow day, either the evening beforehand (when a storm
seems both large in size and certain to hit us) or, more typically, early morning of the actual
snow day itself.
Thanks and here’s to snow people who are depending on our students to bring them to life.
Sincerely,
James Stoneton II, Superintendent of Schools