#CloseFCPS Wins the Spotlight
The first snow of winter generates another bout of monumental uprise when FCPS refuses to cancel school.
#ExtremeMeasures — Students use Twitter to reach the FCPS school board in hopes of persuading them to cancel school. Students even took to spamming the hashtag in order to garner more attention.
December 16, 2019
Loading ...Every year, when winter rolls around again, the anticipation of snow on the forecast provides hope for mainly one thing: school being canceled. With FCPS being the largest public school division in Virginia, the power the amount of students can possess is unsurprisingly a lot. On Dec.16th many students were crossing their fingers as snow lightly fell through the night. However, in order to ensure that school would not be opening, they took to a popular social media site, Twitter, to make their voices heard.
“I was up all night, waiting to see what the verdict would be and I saw tweets coming in every second with #closeFCPS,” sophomore Ava Nguyen said. “I even procrastinated my studying a bit thinking that I wouldn’t have to take any quizzes today because there’d be no school.”
Thousands of people flooded the social media platform with their opinions throughout the night, resulting in over 4,000 tweets with the hashtag close FCPS. This onslaught of complaints led to #closeFCPS being number 18 on Twitter’s U.S. trending page.
“I thought it was awful that other counties have the day off and we are in school and slipping on the sidewalks,” sophomore Yanni Aknine said.
Along with Aknine, many people tweeted about how Louden and Prince William counties closed today due to unsafe road conditions and hazardous sidewalks. Although the hashtag seemed to be dominated by outraged students, many students went against the seemingly popular opinion.
“They’re [FCPS] honestly not wrong; most students just want to miss tests,” sophomore Mikayla Li said. “They did the right thing by not closing. Even though I wanted them to, it would’ve been unreasonable considering it wasn’t even at freezing temperatures.”
Teachers, upon finding that busses with their students were late due to the weather, also expressed their thoughts on the topic.
“I don’t think that the conditions really warrant us being closed, which just makes me think that all the other counties played it super safe,” english teacher Linda Chang said. “At the same time with the number of buses that were late this morning, I think that having a two hour delay would have been a better call.”
Despite the Twitter uproar, the Fairfax County school board was unfazed, as it has historically happened every year; some of student’s missions being more successful than others. However, it doesn’t discourage people from trying whenever the little snowflake icon shows up on their weather app.
“I am not surprised that it went trending and FCPS still didn’t close, because that happens a lot,” Aknine said. “But I am disappointed that they seem to not listen to us when the 4,000 who are affected ask them to at least listen to what we have to say.”