Dr. David Hopson
Although I shared the process used to determine delays, early releases, or school cancellations due to weather and road conditions earlier this school year, I’m going to quickly review the decision process used in the last few weeks and elaborate on a few items. I also want to remind people that this year’s school calendar only has 5 snow days built into the schedule before we start using April vacation days as make-up days. As of January 6, we have used 4 snow days leaving only one more school cancellation before taking days off of April vacation. (As a reminder, please use the updated calendar for April vacation dates, which the school committee changed last fall to April 18-25).
While the decision to cancel school, delay the start time or have an early release impacts the district and all students, it remains each family’s decision as to whether they believe conditions in their own neighborhood are safe enough to allow their children to attend school. This Monday’s late start was a good example of this as, depending on where you were, temperatures and road conditions varied greatly within a very short distance. While these absences wouldn’t be considered ‘excused’ under the attendance policy, the majority of students have sufficient leeway that missing a day of school due to local weather or road conditions would not impact their standing in school.
As everyone knows, we’ve missed four days of school to date. The first was a combination event, i.e., we started with a 2-hour delay as we were told the highway departments would be able to make the roads safe with some additional time. Shortly before that 2-hour window was up, one of our local highway departments let us know that they were not able to keep up with the icing on the roads thus requesting that school be cancelled for the day. While we don’t like changing the call, we must also be cognizant that safety of our students in our primary consideration in bad weather and make the change as conditions dictate. The second cancellation was also interesting as it was a day that we had already scheduled an early release for professional development. Given that timing, the timing of the storm, and the road conditions that morning, the decision was made to cancel school.
January 2nd was an easy call given the predictions of the weather services (despite the snow starting somewhat later than predicted, the roads did become slippery fairly quickly). The next day was almost a given that we wouldn’t have school because of the Governor’s announcement of a shutdown of state government and his request that private businesses consider closing that day. Today’s (January 6) delay was based upon town highway departments’ difficulty in keeping dirt roads safe to travel due to the rain bringing the frost out of the ground and washing away the sand: a problem evidently not faced in the more populated areas that do not have significant numbers of dirt roads!
Just a reminder that we make decisions based upon conditions in the entire district; while you may have good road conditions in your neighborhood, conditions just up the road may be severe enough to make traveling in a school bus dangerous. While we weren’t the only district cancelling school, or having delayed starts so far this year, we could be in the situation at some point of being the only school doing so, but please remember that we have a large district with varied topography and we’ll make the decision we think is in the best interest of our students.
