We’ve been fortunate this fall to have relatively warm and calm weather, although this has also kept us significantly under normal precipitation levels for the year. However, this past week’s change from warm sunny weather to much colder temperatures and snow showers is certainly a precursor to our upcoming winter weather. So, despite it only being late October, given the fact that this is New England and the weather often changes several times in a single day, I thought I’d offer my annual review of weather-related school closings.
As anyone who travels within the district knows, we often have very different weather occurring at the same time, depending on your elevation. It’s not unusual to drive from downtown Huntington up into either Chester or Blandford and experience rain changing over to snow, or to find the temperatures drop enough to make the roads icy. Given that we’re a regional district, this means that we may cancel school due to winter weather in the hills while sites along the river are experiencing just normal rain. We’ve also had times where the higher elevations were ok but the areas around the rivers were icing up.
Because of this, it’s never easy to make a decision regarding delaying the start of school, cancelling school for the day, or choosing to release early. All of these decisions create difficulties for many of our families around work schedules, child care, and even moving around the district, but the primary concern has to be focused on student safety, particularly in getting buses to and from school. I believe we’re fortunate to have wonderful highway departments who work diligently to ensure safe travel across our towns and I count on these experts to give me the information needed to make decisions during inclement weather.
I normally get calls about road conditions early in the morning, often from someone who’s actually plowing or sanding the roads at that time. This is necessary in order to get notifications out to the bus company, news media, staff, and our families in a timely fashion. Thankfully, notifying staff and families has become much easier given our ability to contact people though an ‘autodial’ system (another reason to ensure that your current contact information is kept up-to-date with the schools). Cancelling school rather than delaying the start of school is based upon what we know about the storm: when it will start, whether it will intensify during the morning, how long it will last, what type of impact it may have on the area – all based upon reviewing a number of weather forecasts (which often seem to interpret the same data differently). If a storm is expected to wind down early in the morning, or has already ended, and road crews just need time to prepare the roads for safe transit, we can often just delay the start of school. However, if the storm is still going strong and predicted to last for a while, school cancellation is called for.
Perhaps the hardest call to make is when a storm is predicted to hit sometime that day, especially if the prediction is late morning to early afternoon. The question then becomes whether we can get students home safely on a regular schedule, whether we’ll have to release early, or whether, based on the timing, we should just cancel school for the day. Each of these decisions has many ramifications on the operation of the schools regarding student schedules during the day, whether lunch will be served and if so, at what time, and of course getting the buses to the right place at the right time.
Much like the weather forecasts, we try our best to interpret the information we have to make the most informed decision possible. I believe we make the right decisions quite often but also know that sometimes we make a decision that isn’t as accurate as we’d like; as when we cancel school and the storm either hits very late in the day or even misses us completely. Our goal is to make the best decision we can with what we know at the time, keeping in mind that the primary mission is to keep our students safe.
