Our county school system has a remote learning platform in place that is used for bad weather days. It keeps the schools from needing to do make up days. I wonder how long it could be effective. It seems like an ok way to handle lessons and coursework for a few days but I wonder if there would be a wide gap in student achievement if it needed to go beyond that limited scope.
I teach high school English. We have a similar system. It is fine for the odd day here or there, but it significantly limits the level of intervention that is possible when students run into problems with their work. IMO - We would have a hard time maintaining our current level of expectation if my school had to rely on our remote learning program for an extended period of time.
I'll agree that learning is (hopefully) the main point of school, but we can't dismiss the effect that having kids at home means there needs to be one adult at home as well (up to some age at least).
Just curious, how extreme weather do you get where you live? We have some rough weather at times, but I've never heard of closed anything due to bad weather.
I can't speak for the op, but in Minnesota (in the northern part of the US), there are days in the winter when the temperature gets as low as -30F (~ -35C) with very high winds. This can make for very dangerous travel. Occasionally there are snow storms that make the roads impassable for part of the day.
On these sorts of days, the schools are sometimes closed to keep people off the roads.
I grew up in Montana, same latitude as MN. The entirety of my K-12 schooling was done there. We never once had our schools close for snow, but we did have 2 closures due to extreme cold. Once it was so cold, the school's boilers couldn't keep up heating the buildings. The other, the boilers were going so hard they actually managed to start a fire in the ceilings.
That said, there were days where snow prevented me from getting to school and days where the drive home was treacherous (the only way to tell where the road was the highway reflectors sticking out of the snow). I also learned how to chain up the first year I had my license. Nearly every day in December that year, I had to chain up to get home (water on ice and ~14% grade on the first hill up to the house).
Also in Montata. Our school has closed for one day in 30 years due to weather. This was due to busses not being able to travel the town roads. Our kids would have been at school since they don't ride the bus. They've failed to get to school one day when my plow truck ended up stuck sideways across our road.
You have to be prepared for the normal. I have friend from MN who lived down south. It took them a long time to get used to the idea that everything shuts down from a cm of snow on the ground - something that would barely keep us at the speed limit (as opposed to the whatever over most people do...). While we do have practice in ice, I expect (without looking up) more people in MN go in the ditch when there is a cm of snow than people in southern states as a result of their paranoid.
In MN though (this applies to many other areas of the world that get a lot of snow/ice/cold) if we shut down that often we would get only have 1-2 weeks of travel between November and April and so it obviously isn't possible to play is safe. So we deal with it by having warm coats, boots, and other infrastructure.
In large swaths of the US, schools (especially grade school and high school) typically close for some number of days each year due to snow. There can be other weather events too but snow's the common one.
Most schools in the midwest US actually build a school calendar that is 7-8 days (or so) longer than is actually necessary. That way if they have to take snow days, they're not going until July; alternatively, if they don't take snow days, everyone gets excited to be let out early. . . when it's really the legal time to be out of school.
I've never heard of a school actually letting out early though. Last year my son had to go an extra week though because they used more than the planed days off.
I'm in Georgia. Anything that results in ice on the roads is treated as extreme. Sometimes they just push back the start time of the school day but if they think ice will be on the road throughout the day, they'll do a remote learning day. I think they're more likely to err on the side of caution now that remote learning is an option. Flooding also has been cause for remote learning days. I've never received a good answer to the question of how they handle students without the appropriate equipment at home for the remote learning days. It's an affluent county with many tech workers so maybe it's not much of an issue.
Presumably you don't live in the Midwest. Over the course of K-12 I had school days cancelled for: snow(probably 12x, maybe more), extreme cold (2-3x), freezing rain(2x), and flooding (1x). And that is the days it's actually cancelled. There were about as many days where school was started 2-hours later or let out early due to snow, extreme cold, or occasionally dense fog.
Reasons why school was canceled in places I have lived: snow, hurricanes, floods, wildfire (smoke and danger of burning down), and weather related power outages.
