The Lab community experienced two school closure days in the last week: for expected snow on Jan. 12 and for extreme cold on Jan. 16.
Emails informing the community about the closures were sent from Laboratory Schools Director Tori Jueds the evenings before. According to the emails, school was canceled on Jan. 12 to avoid “dangerous commutes” and on Jan. 16, the day after a nonschool day for Martin Luther King Jr. Day, “due to the extreme cold temperatures.”
Lab’s most recent weather-related school closure was Feb. 2, 2022.
With a total of five days away from campus, some students found the school closures as a time to catch up with work and relax. Other students and teachers were frustrated by the disruption to sports events, extracurricular activities and synchronous class time.
The second email from Ms. Jueds addressed the unexpected loss of class time and said teachers could assign asynchronous work or ideas to keep busy at home, depending on the age of students.
For art teacher Jason Pallas, the closures hit at an unideal time in the semester. He said they had forced him to modify the end-of-semester timeline for his classes.
“These snow days hit during the crunch time of the semester as we are all working to wrap things up,” he said.
Physics teacher Matthew Bonges had to push back a test. Mr. Bonges said he assigned asynchronous work, and as a result, the snow days did not have a big impact on his teaching schedule otherwise.
Senior Daisy Coleman said she was able to relax.
“There was not that much homework assigned,” she said, “so even though I had some homework to do, I was able to get it done and not worry about work for a change.”
Ninth grader Hannah Gao said she was excited when she heard about the snow days because she could sleep in and postpone doing homework and studying.
“I was happy because I got to skip my quizzes for another day,” Hannah said.
However, for ninth grader Carter Elligan, a member of the varsity boys basketball team, the snow days negatively impacted him. Because of them, a game against Francis W. Parker School and a practice were canceled. Carter said he and his team have to adapt as a result.
“Our time as a team is really important, and without practice, it really hurts us,” Carter said. “Not having practice impacted our team in a really poor way.”
