East Lansing Kids Beg, Sing, and Tweet in Fruitless Hopes of a Snow Day

Above: Student Rep Anaiis Rios-Kasoga told Superintendent Dori Leyko on Monday her peers want a snow day soon.

East Lansing Public Schools Superintendent Dori Leyko isn’t feeling bullied. No. She is, rather, feeling quite amazed at the lengths students are going to in an effort to talk her into calling a snow day before chances run out this academic year.

Leyko told the Board of Education Monday that she had never before had a song written just for her. But fifth graders at Whitehills Elementary School did just that in the hopes of talking Leyko into a snow day:

Older students, meanwhile, have taken to Twitter to try to convince Leyko that the roads might just be too dangerous to hold school.

To one, Leyko replied, “I CANNOT call a snow day when the grass is still showing – the other superintendents would laugh at me.”

But one student disagreed: “Let’s just call it now. I think the grass is covered enough ya knowww.”

Students warned Leyko that they were seeing people slide off the roads on Sunday.

But Leyko goes out and checks the roads herself, and on Sunday, she answered the pleas with this: “Well, @eltrojans, I just took a drive around EL and didn’t find the roads to be bad. I did, however, find this huge herd of deer out roaming so please watch out for them on your drive to school in the morning.”

Leyko told the School Board on Monday that she gained about fifty followers on Sunday, all of them trying to talk her into a snow day. Some new followers told her they signed up on Twitter just to try to score a snow day.

And she got no break at Monday’s meeting, where student representative Anaiis Rios-Kasoga conveyed there a message from her peers: “We have fingers crossed for a snow day in the near future.”

School Board Member Kate Powers told Leyko she was glad the superintendent makes the snow-day decision and not Board members, as the kids can be pretty relentless. Powers asked what happens if the year is ending and no snow days have been called.

Answered Leyko, it’s like insurance: if you don’t use it, you don’t get it back. She suggested the extra learning would make up for the lost learning last year, when the District went over “budget” on the number of snow days banked.

Leyko’s performance review is coming up shortly. Fortunately for her, it will be conducted by the School Board, and not by Ms. Pike’s fifth graders at Whitehills.