Sorry kids, Tuesday’s snow day is not likely to be repeated in the Williamsport Area School District unless a major storm which takes out the power hits the area.

A series of events including the Thanksgiving holiday, found most of the students in the district without their remote learning devices with them at home, prompting the district to declare a snow day instead of a remote learning day. Not so, in the future, according to

Dr. Timothy S. Bowers, superintendent.

“We really don’t do snow days in the Williamsport School District,” Bowers explained.

He noted that the district combining parent/teacher conference days with the Thanksgiving break resulted in students being away from the classroom for a full week plus the Monday after the holiday.

“Most of our buildings did not send devices home because they were concerned about devices not being charged or lost or something crazy happening. So they weren’t sent home,” Bowers said.

“We try to make a practice of sending devices home in case there is a weather issue. It didn’t happen this time. We’ll go back and kind of look at that and how we can prevent that,” he added.

Bowers pointed out that snow days “don’t kill us,” and that “there are certain students and people that do like an old-fashioned snow day.”

“We do have to do it sometimes-if there’s a blizzard, or we think that the internet’s going to be wiped out, or power is going to be wiped out. So we already have that in our bag of tricks as well. But the reason that we might keep this idea of remote learning is because we think it’s a tool that students need in the future, and we think it’s a tool that our teachers need to continue to practice. We have really endorsed and kept this idea of doing remote days for lots of reasons,” he said.

One of those reasons, he cited, was that by using days because of snow events, that takes away from possibly using those in the spring when Bowers said it has been found beneficial to both students and teachers to have a break from school.

“When you use snow days and you have to replace those with spring days, you’ll lose that opportunity in the spring to recharge batteries and get people fresh again,” he said.

“When we were forced to kind of go into this remote learning platform, we learned a lot about that. We’ve spent a lot of money on the devices. We spent a lot of money on professional development, and there are things that we want to continue to move forward,” he said, adding that the decision to close Tuesday, “it pained me, quite honestly…we just didn’t have a choice.”

Bower indicated that the district was considering options for replacing the lost day of instruction.