One of the best things about winter is waking up to a phone call, narrated by a choppy robot, saying that school is canceled. These days bring forth spontaneous adventures like sledding and hot cocoa. These blissful times will be limited thanks to a new Pennsylvania Department of Education law and NASD’s application to it.

The Flexible Instructional Day Program (FID) was added to act 64 of 2019 under section 1506 of the Public School Code. There are five days built into the school year like designed to be used after snow days run out. This allows schools to get all of their 180 days in a timely manner.

The law states that schools can create a program, either online, offline or a combination of both, that has instruction or learning even if students are not at the school itself. Essentially, students are assigned tasks by a teacher during a snow day.

Snow days are days in which school is scheduled to take place, but due to poor weather conditions, they cannot.

Many schools in our area, like North Hills and Seneca valley, have already jumped on the FID bandwagon. 

North Allegheny’s FIDs will be predominantly run through blackboard. By 9:30 a.m., teachers will assign each student around twenty minutes of work per class. There is a possibility that some students will not have adequate internet access during a day that even the schools are unable to operate. Therefore, North Allegheny students will be given five days to complete their work.

Sophomore, Jess Geng says “I think that it’s not that bad because we have five days to do it and we don’t have to do all the work on the day of the FID.”

Flexible Instructional Days are designed to count as one of the 180 school days in a year, and all of those days require students to take attendance. This means that your attendance for the FID is based on whether or not the work is completed.

This new addition to North Allegheny’s calendar can be seen in two ways. On one hand, it means that students must complete work on days that would normally be snow days when they could be enjoying the sledding on a spontaneous day off. However, on the other hand, FIDs prevent remake days when we would normally not have school, and they only are only enacted after we have used four snow days.

Freshman, Cate Maldia says “I support this because it eliminates the need for any easy, pointless days at the end of the year that are normally in-service days.”

The recent extension to North Allegheny’s school policy is something students should pay attention to, as it affects everyone. The district is participating in brand new Pennsylvania Education laws, and that is something everyone needs to consider moving forward, as they limiting the days we might not have participated in previously.

Editor’s Note: The policies and plans outlined above are still a work in progress and could be subject to change.