A snow day if the budget allows

A software update to a regional school-closure app would, under a pilot planned for next winter, decide whether a child gets a snow day by checking the household's remaining carbon allowance rather than the depth of the snow. Families over budget would be asked to send their children in anyway, because the school is already heated.

Many school systems now replace traditional snow days with remote-learning days, so a snowfall no longer automatically means a day off. Home heating is the largest single component of household energy use in colder countries, and smart meters and thermostats report it in close to real time. Banks, retailers and lifestyle apps increasingly show customers an estimated carbon footprint for their spending and travel. Employers are starting to include staff commuting in their emissions reporting and to count home-working days as avoided emissions. At the same time, winters in many temperate regions bring fewer days of settled snow than they did a generation ago.

Version 4.2.0 — Closure notifications are now issued per household rather than per school, and are reconciled against the household's remaining annual carbon allowance before sending. — Fixed an issue where a sledge, when driven to a hill in a car, was recorded as a school run. — The “It's snowing” push notification has been retired and replaced with “Conditions are being assessed”, which does not imply an outcome.

The three lines come from the release notes of a closure app used by schools across one northern county, describing a pilot that would go live next January. Under it, a heavy snowfall would no longer close a school for everyone. The app would instead calculate what a day at home costs each household in heating, hot water and, in the phrasing of the notes, “discretionary recreational transport”, then compare the figure with what remains of the family's annual carbon budget. Households in surplus would receive a snow day. Households in deficit would receive a reminder that the school building is already at nineteen degrees and has a roof.

The county's sustainability office would argue that this is not a cut to snow days but a correction. A closed school sends six hundred children to six hundred separately heated rooms, each with a kettle. An open one heats a single hall and, on a snow day, does not need to run the minibuses, because nobody expects them to come. The office would describe this as “consolidated warmth”. The children would attend in the normal way, sit in the normal rooms and look out of the normal windows at the snow, which under the scheme would be classified as a view.

Households would learn their status at six in the morning, when the app would send one of two messages. Marianne Kell, a nurse in a market town, said her family had run last winter's numbers and would have qualified for one snow day, in early December, “provided nobody used the tumble dryer”. Her husband, who bought a sledge in 2019 that has been in the garage since, said he no longer thinks of it as a sledge. “It's a reserved line in the budget,” he said. “It's a plank with a carbon cost written on it.”

The scheme would also produce winners. Pensioners who heat one room, cyclists, and anyone living in a flat above a bakery would find themselves in surplus, and the app would allow surplus to be gifted. Gerald Ambrose, a retired postman in the same county, said he had already been approached by three sets of parents and a dog walker. He does not have grandchildren. He said he had not been this popular since he delivered the post. “I have offered to take the snow day myself,” he said, “but they tell me the hill is for the children.”

Compliance would be handled lightly, according to the notes, which is to say that the app would know. A child recorded at home on a day it had assigned to school would incur no penalty, but that day's heating would be logged at the household's actual rate rather than the school's shared one, and the difference would come off the summer allowance, which in practice is the family holiday. The notes describe this as “no enforcement”. Several parents describe it as the first time a snowman has cost them a week by the sea.

Teachers would be expected to attend as normal, since the building would be open, and the app would not distinguish between a teacher who arrived by bus and one who arrived on foot through a drift. A head of year at one of the participating schools, who asked not to be named after checking her own balance, said staff had been told to prepare “snow-appropriate lessons” for the children who came in. Asked what that meant, she said the geography department had been given the window. The rest were to carry on as if it were raining.

The developers would note, in the same release, that the pilot could be extended to heatwaves, where the logic runs in reverse and the school is the cooler building, and to strikes. A further line in the changelog, filed under known issues, would acknowledge that the system has no setting for a child who simply wants to go outside. It is listed as a low-priority defect, which is where such things are usually kept.