Viva La Kindergarten!

On Snow Angels and Zoom Squares

On January 26, 2026, New York City (NYC) students woke up to a classic winter scene—and a very March 2020 response. NYC public school students faced zoom screens while their private school peers made snow angels. Mayor Mamdani, who offered himself up as snowball target practice as penance, knew the decision was unpopular. The state had already decided. .

The 180-Day Rule: Who It Binds, and Who It Doesn’t

New York’s Board of Regents sets the rules for public school attendance. State law requires “not less than one hundred eighty days” of instruction for public school districts to receive their state aid for the following year. Falling short of the threshold threatens their funding..

When the January snow hit, the city government had a choice to either accept a potential shortfall in days and jeopardize state aid

or convert the day to remote learning and keep the 180-day count intact.

The law effectively made that choice for them. To abide by the law, the city pivoted to remote instruction and public school students had to show up online or take an absence. Their private-school counterparts—who are not subject to this 180-day requirement—were under no such pressure.

It begs a couple of simple questions. If 180 days is truly essential for students’ educational best interest, why is the requirement not universal and if it is not universal, is it really about what students need—or is it about control?

This is not a neutral policy choice; it is an institutional bias embedded in law.

We’ve Seen This Before: Mandated Reporter Laws

There is recent precedent for rethinking unequal application of educational law. Mandated reporter statutes—requiring certain professionals, including teachers, to report reasonable suspicions of child abuse or neglect—did not initially apply to all educators either.

For years, public school teachers were clearly bound as mandated reporters, while staff in some private schools were not. The underlying logic of the law (protecting children from harm) was sound, but its partial application raised obvious concerns: why should a child’s legal protection depend on whether they attend a public or private institution?

Exempt until 2019, New York amended the law to include private school staff, closing this gap and aligning the legal framework more closely with its ethical intent. That change came after sustained critique and advocacy around unequal treatment .

The snow-day/attendance dilemma is a parallel case. When the same structural logic—“children deserve safety” or “children deserve learning time”—is applied differently based solely on school type, we should question  the underlying policy design.

Ethics of Justice: Why We Must Challenge the System

The “ethics of justice” emphasizes fair and equitable treatment of people, including how rules are applied and who benefits or is burdened by them. 

When we have  funding-linked attendance law that binds only public schools,snow-day response that accentuates differences between public and private students’ lived experience, and a clear pattern of state laws initially excluding private schools (as with mandated reporting),
then we are no longer dealing with isolated administrative inconveniences. We are confronting institutionalized inequity that flows directly from policy design.

Only through collective critique and advocacy can we move toward an educational landscape where legal requirements are aligned with both student well-being and principles of justice, regardless of the type of school a child attends.

‘It’s the law’ can and should be the beginning, not the end, of the conversation. 

In the name of snow angels, we owe them that much.