Sneauxpocalypse’s message: Start schools Aug. 1

By Christopher Tidmore
Contributing Columnist

Tuesday’s estimated 9.5 inches of snow not only shut down South Louisiana for most of the week, the blizzard also underlined the fact that increasingly volatile weather occurrences – from hurricanes to tornadoes to floods – have consistently robbed school children of necessary days in the classroom, almost on a yearly basis.

While current Orleans Parish charter school schedules have slowly, year after year, edged earlier, with students often coming to the class on or about the 5 or 6 of August, schools in other parts of the state (and much of the private system) continue in the trend of the last 40 years, starting near the middle of August.

Some claim that one of OPSB’s boost in test scores over the past decade has come about, in part, due to school sessions beginning at an earlier date. Weather was not the original motivation. Part of the reason for the shift to earlier in August by Orleans charter schools tended to deal with a real local problem, many parents had previously not thought that their children needed to be enrolled until after Labor Day. By starting near the beginning of August, that negative tradition has ameliorated somewhat.

Truant September starts might decline even further if schools would commence on about August 1 throughout Louisiana. Children missing a whole month of school stands as a delay even the most reticent of parents can’t justify. Moreover, the impact of weather-related events suggests that school sessions should begin as early in August as possible, to make up for the likely loss of days that could become a common occurrence year after year thanks to climate change.

Louisiana school children no longer miss just a day in the classroom because of the weather. Increasingly losing an entire week has become common place – as the Jan. 21-24 snow event demonstrated – and as increasingly intense hurricanes are closing down the state every two to three years for several days. Beginning the school year on August 1 comes with a fiscal cost, undoubtedly, in higher teacher pay and adjustments on union contracts. Still, with a finite number of classroom hours until the all important high stakes testing of LEAP (and the associated advancement exams), students missing a week of education can make all the difference between passage and failure.

Legislators should take action in the April 2025 Regular Session to mandate that weather events will never deny our children the minimum number of school days to succeed.

This article originally published in the January 27, 2025 print edition of The Louisiana Weekly newspaper.