Being in New England — and remembering the saying ‘if you don’t like the weather, wait a minute’ — it’s time to review school closings, delays, and early releases due to inclement weather. While we’ve had a mild fall and the leaves are still on the trees, it is possible that a sudden cold snap with freezing temperatures could severely impact our ability to safely move around the district.
I’ve heard several superintendents say that their most difficult, and challenged, decisions relate to weather closings. Amazingly, for the first time in many years, the eastern part of the state had many delays, early releases and no school days called on account of snow last year. I think it is interesting that, due to the large number of eastern school systems facing this all too common scenario in western Massachusetts, the state finally changed how those days are counted and might be made up. It would appear once again that, if it doesn’t happen inside of 495 it really doesn’t matter. While the changes would not have impacted decisions we’ve made over the past few years, we’re waiting for clarification on how to make up time without having students physically attend school. It may be years before we have the Internet capacity in our area to do any type of ‘online’ instruction that is meaningful, timely, and capable of meeting the new attendance requirements.
Regardless, these items have not meaningfully changed how we make decisions around inclement weather and I’ll outline how and why such decisions are made. Our primary concern in bad weather is the safety of students. We understand that delays, early releases and cancelling school often entails difficulties for our families in lining up child care and/or changing schedules, which is another reason why these decisions are so difficult. After making these choices for well over a decade, I know that they may seem wrong depending on your location, i.e., you may be getting rain in Russell when just a couple of miles up the hill, Blandford may be experiencing ice or snow. That’s always been one of the interesting problems in having such a large and geographically diverse topography; our weather is often very different from one part of the district to another. This is also the reason that Gateway may be the only district, or one of just a handful, to make a decision in the area. We do not rely on what other districts are doing; rather we rely on the weather forecast, what’s actually happening at the time, reports from local highway departments, police and different individuals who live throughout the district.
The easiest calls are when everything aligns just right, the forecast is for bad weather, the precipitation is already accumulating at 4:30 a.m., and the highway departments call warning of bad road conditions. Unfortunately that doesn’t happen very often, which makes for some interesting choices based upon the information I have at that moment. For example, if a significant storm is expected that day, but not predicted to start until mid-morning do we cancel or plan an early release? If you’re already in school and the storm is predicted to start mid-afternoon, do you release students early or at the regular time? Furthermore, if it has been snowing overnight, but is expected to stop by 6 or 7 a.m., can things be cleaned up in time to have a late start rather than cancel school?
When you consider these weather and topographical factors, and then add in other considerations such as the preparation and serving of lunch, the time it takes to get everyone home from the end of school (this can be significant if the roads start getting slippery before every bus has finished their routes), the time to clean up and plow the school parking lots and sidewalks, and even the knowledge that forecasts are often not as accurate as we’d like, it is easy to see that these decisions are not simple or straightforward.
