Editorial: Don’t steal SC students’ class time just because it snowed

AS OFTEN HAPPENS, even in South Carolina, it snowed last month — enough that some schools closed for a day or two.

And so as night follows day, local legislators are scrambling to steal a bit of education away from the children who live in those snowbound districts.

Last week, the House passed single-county bills to let the school districts in York, Greenwood and Pickens counties shortchange students by one or two of the 180 days worth of education that state law guarantees them each year. Teachers and administrators still will be paid; the kids just won’t get anything out of the deal.

Not to be outdone, Chester County legislators filed a bill on Thursday to steal schooling from students in their county, and there’s no reason to think the House won’t approve it by Wednesday.

The only thing surprising about our legislators’ haste to forgive snow days is that it took them so long. Well, that and the fact that Greenville County legislators, who were the first out of the box with the school-theft legislation, back on March 3, haven’t yet passed their bill.

If you think schools ought to build snow days into their schedules, you’re right. And as far as we know, they do, because state law requires them to do that; five days, in fact. But state legislators — you know, the people who passed the state law — don’t like that law. So every time it snows, or rains too much, or classes get canceled for whatever reason for which they get canceled, the local legislators rush in to pass special resolutions suspending the state law and allowing the districts to not use their snow days. (And in the most ironic twist, they also give parents the right to “forgive” days their children missed of home-schooling. Seriously.)

Mind you, this isn’t a case of schools having used up all five of their snow days; it’s a case of legislators encouraging them to not use their snow days. Because, you know, that might inconvenience some parents, who already have made vacation plans for those dates. And why wouldn’t they make vacation plans for those days? After all, legislators always do this.

We can’t say for certain why they do it — whether they are inundated by school districts that don’t want to spend the money to operate the schools another day, or by parents who don’t want their vacations interrupted, or whether they just imagine they might get inundated by … somebody. All we can say for sure is that by doing this, our legislators send a very clear signal about how much they value education: not much.

There’s nothing magical about a 180-day school year. We could pack everything students need to know into 170 days, perhaps with a bit more homework; or we could stretch it out to 200 days. Or more or less. What’s important about 180 is that’s the number of days we’ve told teachers they have to teach everything that needs to be covered in a year. When we take away a day, we make it more difficult to teach all that information, and the later it is in the year when we take away that day, the more difficult it is to make it up.

Last year, state senators talked a good game about not giving in to these cheat-our-kids-out-of-their-education measures, but in the end they gave in to the adolescent impulse to treat school like a chore rather than the opportunity, entitlement and right that it is.

We can only hope that this time they’ll act like the grown-ups we used to think they were, and allow children to have the education we promised them.

This story was originally published March 23, 2015 at 5:00 PM.