Why Nova Scotia has more snow days than Massachusetts
We spoke with a researcher who studied school closures due to snow across North America. He found that Nova Scotia pulled the trigger on snow days at a disproportionate rate.
Paul Bennett is known as “Dr. Snow Day” after spending the past 20 years studying their impacts on children’s education.
He’s predicting Nova Scotia is going to set new records this season for the number of school days lost through cancellations from snow.
In Massachusetts, the normal guideline is if there are four inches of snow, about 10 centimetres, school is closed, according to Bennett. He compared the state's school closures against Nova Scotia’s, using data from 2003 to 2010.
(Nathan Coleman/The Weather Network)
“What I discovered was amazing. School closes far more often in Nova Scotia than in Massachusetts. [It happens] twice as often. It takes half as much snow to close schools in Nova Scotia, and there’s no requirement in Nova Scotia to replace cancelled days," said Bennett.
He says the current 2025-26 school year is setting new records. The average across the entire province is now close to 10 days lost.
So, why does it matter if students are kept safe off the roads and get extra time to play in the snow? Bennett says there is a lot of data in the U.S. about the impacts of missing more than five days.
“In North Carolina, there’s a study there that shows it had a devastating effect on math scores in elementary schools. There is lots of data on graduation rates," said Bennett.
So, if the snowstorms keep coming, be sure to get out the math textbook.