It's 7 a.m. Thursday, not a flake of snow has fallen, and virtually every school district in the Hudson Valley has canceled classes for the day.

There'll be snow later, probably a lot, meaning most of these districts will be closed on Friday, too.

Then we're supposed to get another storm on Sunday, so schools inevitably will be closed on Monday.

At that point, the start of winter still will be five days away, and, in all likelihood, the Kingston school district will have used three of its 2007-08 "snow days," and Onteora, which burned two in recent weeks, will have used five.

Is it any wonder that this is the only part of New York state in which school districts don't give kids a week of vacation time in February? They can't. They allocate too many snow days, and then they use up that allocation simply because they can.

How silly.