Snow Days: we should factor them into the official schedule and workflow

It's time for York University to build in margin to its official schedule for "snow day" events. As I've discussed before, we should design and manage our university's infrastructure and processes to reflect the reality that we have to operate in the winter.

Today, January 15, 2026, a snow storm has hit southern Ontario, including the Greater Toronto Area. As of 6:20am, multiple school boards have announced closures and school bus companies have cancelled service. Up to 30 cm of snow are expected.

We have received an email, as of 5:40am that YorkU has shut operations:

And it appears that the YorkU security app sent out an alert before 6am, per this Reddit post. By 8am our Engineering School had emailed the community too. (including an "App armour" alert)

I'm relieved to hear that the University has decided to close its doors. Good call! This is a reasonable action to keep employees and students safe while also allowing our facilities staff and its contractors the time and space to clear the snow from roadways, sidewalks, and building entrances. The risk of slips, trips, falls and vehicular accidents are real in Winter, including during heavy snow falls.

This is an opportunity to review and discuss our workflows and policies for snow days. Clearly, the current process for declaring a "weather emergency" on a day like this worked today. That's a success. If there is no other takeaway from this blog post, that should be it. Well done to management and our operations staff for making that call.

Build in Margin for Snow Days

That said, it's also important to consider the impact that this will have on activities such as classes, labs, tutorials and tests (among all the other types of work, including time-sensitive research that happen at York). We will now have to determine how to make up for this "snow day". Rather than improvise lectures on Zoom or arbitrarily tacking on an additional days into a semester to make up for them, I think that we should have a collegially-driven process for dealing with such events. I grew up in Québec City and our public schools built margin into the official schedule for snow days. Maybe we should be considering that.

When we look up emergency policies for disruptions at the Senate level here at York, I found the following page on Class and Examination Scheduling, Academic Activities Disruption, Emergencies. Surprisingly, the links for Weather Emergencies and Emergency Preparedness, shown below,

both lead to "not found pages":

Web page not found. (https://www.yorku.ca/secretariat/policies/policies/weather-emergencies-procedures)

Whoops. So, it looks like we need to clean up some of the documentation links. Luckily other links did work, like this one on Weather Emergencies. Un

I was able to find a page that appears to be relevant, albeit really old (circa 2007). This page outlines what appears to be a rather involved process for making up (remediating) time for missed courses from a snow day:

I think that we learned a lot about teaching in crisis during the pandemic and those lessons should be incorporated our teaching workflows in events like weather emergencies. I would suggest that it's time for that discussion and for us to come up with a robust approach to deal with such issues.

In the mean time, I think that we need to also reflect on tightening up how we operationalize existing procedures for weather emergencies, starting with messaging.

Improving messaging

Messaging this morning was good, but it could be improved. I first heard about the closure of York on the radio. Others probably read about it in their emails, via the emergency app or on Reddit.

According to the Weather Emergency Procedure policy , messaging about the weather emergency was to have been sent out across multiple channels.

However, if we look at the "safety" page, the alert is only found, in small text, at the top, in a red-orange colour. Because so many York web pages contain a heavy dose of red, the alert doesn't stand out.

Furthermore, the icons listed in the Appendix, such as

are not used. Something close has been posted on Twitter:

(An aside: X/Twitter is a problematic platform and York should consider minimizing or eliminating its presence on it and shift to other social media platforms like BlueSky, etc)

But, on the main YorkU page, at 6:30am, there was no alert:

A barely visible red-orange banner, similar to the one on the Security page, appeared later, by 7:45am. A better, larger alert, with icons as suggested in the Appendix of the Weather Emergency Policy document should have appeared instead.

Conclusion

Overall, the response today to the weather emergency has been good so far. The right call -- to close the university -- was made. I'm curious to see what the state of sidewalks and building entrances will be tomorrow when I'm assuming that I'll be back on the Keele campus. I appreciate that it's going to be a lot of work for the workers who have to do all the snow clearing and I hope that (considering the staffing and budget cuts) there is sufficient staff and equipment to do a thorough job. Fingers crossed that we don't have any more slips on ice this Winter.

Updates

8:29am: to include a note about the Lassonde email.

11:40am: bicycle in snow photo added and introduction paragraph updated. Additional tags written.

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James Andrew Smith is a Professional Engineer and Associate Professor in the Electrical Engineering and Computer Science Department of York University’s Lassonde School, with degrees in Electrical and Mechanical Engineering from the University of Alberta and McGill University.  Previously a program director in biomedical engineering, his research background spans robotics, locomotion, human birth, music and engineering education. While on sabbatical in 2018-19 with his wife and kids he lived in Strasbourg, France and he taught at the INSA Strasbourg and Hochschule Karlsruhe and wrote about his personal and professional perspectives.  James is a proponent of using social media to advocate for justice, equity, diversity and inclusion as well as evidence-based applications of research in the public sphere. You can find him on Twitter.  You can find him on BlueSky. Originally from Québec City, he now lives in Toronto, Canada.