Alaska education commissioner says districts should stop relying on remote instruction when weather forces school closures

Alaska Education Commissioner Deena Bishop said Thursday that the state education department would reconsider whether to count so-called “e-learning” due to weather-related school closures toward the minimum number of instructional days required under state law.

Bishop made the comments during a state board of education meeting, on the same day that the Anchorage School District and some Mat-Su schools switched to remote learning due to poor road conditions that resulted from freezing rain.

It was not the first time this year that remote learning was substituted for in-person instruction because of inclement weather. An October snowstorm led to school closures in Anchorage and parts of the Mat-Su and the Kenai Peninsula.

“Bad weather happens, but in prior years, we would make up those days. We would say, ‘If we’re out for a day, we’re going to have a day of learning,’ and really, our practices have slid a little bit, and we’ve become more comfortable with, ‘Let’s call today an e-learning day,’ ” Bishop told board members during a presentation on student absenteeism in Alaska.

Alaska’s rate of student absenteeism has skyrocketed since the pandemic. Absenteeism generally refers to a high rate of missed school, regardless of the reason.

Bishop said that weather-related school closures were part of a broader problem of increasing school absences that may be contributing to students’ underperformance in school and poor preparation for post-secondary education and employment.

“One day at a time off, there really is a lack of learning going on. The time on task isn’t there, and it really sets our students and our parents up not to be successful sometimes,” said Bishop.

Under Alaska law, the public school term must include at least 180 days. Up to 10 of those days can be used for in-service training of teachers, meaning students must experience at least 170 days of learning in school.

State law allows for an “emergency closure day” when conditions pose “a threat to the health or safety of students.” The commissioner of the department of education must grant a waiver if closures result in fewer than 170 instructional days, unless the days are made up with additional instructional time.

In Anchorage, the district’s calendar includes 172 instructional days, meaning the first two weather-related school closure days don’t need to be made up with additional instruction.

“Historically, when the number of emergency days exceeded two days in a given year, the district had a number of ways to make up instructional time depending on the specific circumstance,” district spokesperson MJ Thim said in an email. Those ways included converting one of 10 in-service days to an instructional day; lengthening school days for a period of several days or weeks; adding days to the end of the school year; or converting vacation days to instruction days.

The district can also request a waiver to the 170-school-day minimum from the state education department. In 2018, when Anchorage schools were closed for several days due an earthquake, the department granted a waiver for lost instructional days.

In January 2023, the Anchorage School District declared it would temporarily extend the school day by 30 minutes after students lost seven days of instruction due to major snowstorms. But the district’s current policy broadly allows for remote learning to be used instead of additional in-person instructional time.

Thim said the district would comply with policy changes made by the Alaska education department.

Bishop said that prior to the pandemic, the education department allowed individual districts to have up to two snow days a year without mandatory additional school time. Since the pandemic, the department has begun allowing districts to make up that time with “remote learning,” which Bishop and board of education members agreed was not sufficient to make up for lost in-person instruction.

Bishop said she would like the department to return to its pre-pandemic expectations for make-up school time when weather-related school closures are necessary, though she did not provide information on whether and when this policy shift would be enforced.

“E-learning days are going to be reconsidered, and we will take a look at ‘these are the areas in which an e-learning day would be approved,’” said Bishop. In cases of bad weather, “the expectation is that we actually make up days. Build those into your calendar.” She said that the department could continue to permit remote learning when schools must close for other reasons, such as due to malfunctioning boilers.

Joshua Pak, the student adviser to the state board of education and a current student at the Polaris K-12 school in Anchorage, said that in his experience, weather-induced remote learning days are not as effective as remote learning had been during the pandemic.

“My experience as a student right now is that our e-learning days consist of teachers setting up a Zoom meeting where attendance is not mandatory, and there is maybe an assignment or two that they throw up, and sometimes they don’t,” said Pak.

Bishop said that even if teachers better prepare for remote learning days, that would not solve the detrimental impact on younger students.

“Kindergarten students don’t dial into Zooms every day. They don’t sit in front of a screen. We all know that, but just by the allowability, it has made things easier, and with everything that school districts have to do, we’ve just kind of moved this way,” said Bishop.