A Brief History of My History with Snow Days

My history with snow days.

I am a product of private school.  And as such, I became used to the idea of school closing down for whatever reason the administrators deemed necessary.  Too much rain?  School’s closed.  Fifty degrees below zero?  School’s closed.  One of the million varieties of religious holidays?  School’s closed.  (Just kidding.  I went to Catholic school.  We only acknowledged our holidays, of which there was one approximately every three days.) 

So when my mother decided that we had run out of money and I had to attend a public high school, I was given a very unfortunate reminder that the CPS apparently shares the same creed as the Postal Service: “neither snow nor rain nor gloom of night…”

As a kid, I would sit in front of the tv, anxiously awaiting the moment that my school would scroll across the bottom of the screen as part of the school closures.  Being a Catholic school with a name towards the end of the alphabet, the anticipation was always almost too much to bear.  But alas, the school’s name would scroll past and I would kick off my uniform, climb back into bed and watch eight hours of Springer, Sally Jesse Raphael, Donahue, Jenny Jones, Ricky Lake, and our other forgotten national 90s talk show host treasures.

I never gave it much thought that Chicago Public Schools were suspiciously missing from the scrolly list because, well, I saw my school’s name and to hell with everyone else.

But, oh, you don’t know what you’ve got til it’s gone.

In my four years of public high school education, I don’t think I’ve ever had a foul-weather cancellation (but, oddly, Pulaski Day was always a school holiday…and I had to learn about Pulaski on my own, as he wasn’t even taught in school.  “Here kids, take the day off to commemorate a Polish hero that none of are even remotely aware of, aside from the fact that he’s a prominent street name in Chicago.”).  By my senior year, I started having to make my own snow days. 

Don’t get me wrong: I understand why some schools might want to remain open.  A lot of children will probably rely on the schools as warming and feeding centers.  But I lived a good twenty minutes from school (oh, the joys of attending a non-neighborhood Magnet school).  So if nothing was plowed or shoveled, a lot of my classmates and I were sludging through hell just to get to a building where we were going to behave like jackasses and pay attention to absolutely no one.

(Just kidding!  We were absolute angels!  Like, cray cray adorbz.)

Of course, my childlike mind saw any accumulation or drop of temperature as a potential Roland Emmerich movie and couldn’t understand why two inches of snow couldn’t be the standard closure measurement, like in Marks, Mississippi (according to family member accounts).  Looking back on it, perhaps I was being bratty.  Perhaps I was spoiled by my private school days.  Maybe CPS was just looking out for our best interest (which is evident by the amazing number of school closures in the past few years).  But, in the end, we’re Chicagoans.  We laugh in the face of “lake effect snow.”  A negative temperature reading won’t stop us from going to a Bears game.  But I didn’t appreciate this until I became an adult and realized my bosses didn’t give two flying fucks about a “snow day.” 

Wait…this sounds suspiciously like high school…