On the morning of Monday, February 23, New York City public school students stayed home for something the city had not given them since 2020, a traditional snow day with no laptop log-in attached. Getting it took a waiver from State Education Commissioner Betty Rosa, and the teachers union's president, Michael Mulgrew, put the decision in one line: "Having a traditional snow day is the right decision."

A month earlier, on January 26, the same system had done the opposite and moved its classes online for a storm. Across the rest of the state, families spent last winter learning a quieter version of the same lesson. A district's calendar holds only so many emergency closing days, and once those are gone, the next storm can become a school day held at the kitchen table.

Every public school district in New York has to put its answer to that question in writing before September 1 of each year, in an Emergency Remote Instruction Plan that sits inside its district-wide safety plan. Parents can read it now, before the first storm, and this guide explains what the rules require, what they leave to each district, and what to look for.

What New York Law Requires on a Snow Day

The starting point is Education Law 3604, which requires schools to be "actually in session" and taught by a qualified teacher for not less than 180 days a year. A district that falls short loses one one-hundred-eightieth of its base-year foundation aid for every missing day, which is why superintendents guard the calendar so carefully. The commissioner can disregard up to five days lost to extraordinary conditions such as extreme weather, a heating failure or a gas leak, but only when the district cannot make them up with scheduled vacation days before the Regents examination period, and days covered by a declared state or local emergency are treated separately.

New York also counts time. Under the commissioner's regulations in 8 NYCRR 175.5, students in full-day kindergarten through grade 6 must receive at least 900 hours of instruction a year and students in grades 7 through 12 at least 990 hours, with lunch and recess excluded. Since 2022, the Board of Regents has allowed remote instruction delivered on an emergency closure day to count toward both the 180-day floor and those annual hours, as long as the district follows its own plan and the superintendent certifies it at year end.

The flexibility grew out of a two-year snow day pilot. When the Regents moved to make it permanent in 2022, their staff reported that 126 districts had used it in 2020-21, most of them on Long Island and in the Hudson Valley, and that higher-need districts had used it less. The Regents item stated the expectation in a single sentence: "Instruction must be provided to all students."

A Remote Day Is a Choice, Not a Mandate

The most important fact for parents is printed plainly in the State Education Department's guidance on remote instruction during emergencies: "Schools are not required to provide remote instruction for students on emergency closure days." A district may close outright and spend a snow day from its bank, or it may stay in session online, and the decision belongs to the district.

The same guidance limits remote days to days a district would otherwise have closed for an emergency on a scheduled session day, so a district cannot plan a remote Friday in advance to stretch a holiday weekend. The state sets no minimum number of hours for a remote day and no ceiling on how many remote days a district may hold in a year. Districts that receive foundation aid must estimate in their plan how many instructional hours they intend to claim for each remote day, and they report the hours they delivered at the end of the year.

Transportation is the detail families in private and charter schools most often miss. When a district is in session, "remotely or otherwise," the guidance says it must still provide transportation to students attending religious and independent schools and charter schools, and any weather decision to cancel buses must rest on real-time safety information.

The Six Things Every District Plan Must Say

State guidance requires each plan to cover six subjects. It must explain how the district makes computers or other devices available so students can join live, synchronous lessons, and how it handles internet access for students who lack it at home. It must set expectations for staff on the balance of live and asynchronous work, with asynchronous assignments treated as supplementary rather than the core of the day.

The plan also has to describe how students without suitable digital access will receive instruction, how special education and related services will be delivered under each student's IEP, and, for foundation aid districts, the estimated hours claimed per remote day. Districts must accept public comment for at least 30 days and hold at least one public hearing before the board adopts the plan, and they survey families every year about device and internet access, reporting the results to the state by June 30.

The department's guidance memo also asks that plans be "informative and accessible to parents, guardians, teachers," and it requires a plan even from districts that never intend to hold a remote day. There is no state template, which is why plans read so differently from one district to the next.

What Real Plans Look Like, From the North Country to the Capital Region

The Moriah Central School District in Essex County adopted its 2026-27 remote instruction plan on July 7. It states that during an emergency closing "synchronous instruction is the preferred method of instruction," promises a Chromebook to every student from kindergarten through grade 12 and a hotspot to "any families that indicate a need for reliable internet," and declares the remote day "a required attendance day." Its worked example claims 5 hours and 25 minutes of instruction for grades K-6 and 6 hours and 10 minutes for grades 9-12.

Burnt Hills-Ballston Lake, in Saratoga County, sets a stricter frame in the plan it has used since 2023-24. Students follow their regular class schedule online, cameras stay on unless a teacher says otherwise, attendance is taken through Google Meet, and the district claims the same daily hours it would for an in-person day, from 6 hours and 15 minutes in the elementary grades to 6 hours and 35 minutes in high school.

In Central New York last February, a CNY Central survey of districts found very different snow-day positions within the same week. Pulaski had no emergency days left and said further closures would go remote, Central Square had used five of its six, North Syracuse still had two in the bank, and Baldwinsville had tied a fifth emergency day to a scheduled May flex day before any switch to remote learning. Across the districts in that survey, calendars carried between three and six emergency days.

What Parents Have Said About Remote Snow Days

Reaction in New York City last winter split along the lines most families will recognize. "I'd rather they just called it a snow day," Chris Ninman, the parent of a third grader at a Brooklyn elementary school, told Chalkbeat on January 26, the morning the city moved online. In a March essay in The 74, the Harlem parent Maria McCune focused on the youngest learners: "It is particularly unreasonable to ask children under the age of 6 to participate in synchronized remote learning."

The numbers from that January day showed the practical gap. Of roughly 500,000 students required to log in, about 395,000 did, according to figures reported at the time. A month later, Mulgrew told union members that the commissioner granted the February 23 waiver for reasons including a citywide travel ban and the fact "that students and staff are unlikely to have the equipment they need for a day of remote learning."

How to Read Your District's Plan Before the First Storm

Start on the district website, where the plan must be posted as part of the district-wide safety plan, and then compare it with the school calendar's emergency days. The two documents together tell you how many traditional snow days your child can expect before closures turn into remote days, and whether the district will instead give back a vacation day or a spring flex day. Our guide to what changed in New York schools for 2026-27 covers the other calendar and policy shifts families are tracking this year.

Look next at the hours the district claims for a remote day and at what it expects from the youngest children. A plan that claims a full in-person day of hours for kindergarten should explain how a five-year-old spends them, and a plan that leans on asynchronous packets should say how teachers check that the work happened. If your child has an IEP or a 504 plan, find the paragraph on related services, since speech, occupational therapy and counseling sessions are the pieces most easily lost on a remote day.

Check whether a remote day counts for attendance, because many districts, Moriah and Burnt Hills-Ballston Lake among them, treat it as a required attendance day. If your child rides a district bus to a private, parochial or charter school, ask how the district will decide on transportation when public school students are learning from home. Answer the district's device and internet survey when it arrives, since those responses shape what the district promises in the next year's plan.

Meals are the one subject neither the state guidance nor the plans we reviewed address, so families who rely on school breakfast and lunch should ask the district directly what happens on a remote day. Plans are revisited every year, and the 30-day comment period and public hearing that come before each September 1 adoption are the moments when a parent's question becomes part of the record. District policy documents often lag the practice they describe, a pattern we examined in our look at outdated school district policy manuals.

The State Education Department's educational technology office answers questions about the rules at [email protected] or 518-474-5461.