As Minnesota braces for yet another big snowstorm, state lawmakers are thinking about temporarily easing a requirement that school districts must make up “snow days” later in the school year. Rochester Republican Carla Nelson says for some districts this season’s make-ups would extend the school year two weeks. “You can imagine what that would do to graduation. You can imagine what that would do to family vacations,” she says.
Nelson’s bill, which the Minnesota Senate passed this week, allows districts to take any number of snow days this year without making them up. But a House bill would allow only three days without make-ups — those at the end of January during the worst of the “polar vortex.”