Weather-Related School Closure - 2022
November 7, 2022
We have had such a beautiful fall, I almost forgot that winter is just ahead of us. Time for my annual newsletter about school delays and school closures during the winter months.
The weather in New England is notoriously unpredictable.
We live in an unstable weather zone, where slight shifts in the airflow east or west can positively or negatively affect the actual weather. We make out best effort to stay ahead of the weather forecasts, but we can be as surprised as you when a prediction of flurries turns into 8 inches of snow, and vice versa.
There is a lag time inherent in making a school-closing decision. In order to give the best possible advice to families who might have childcare concerns, and to staff who may be traveling a fair distance to get to work, when we are making a closure decision in the morning we have to project what will be happening a couple of hours into the future. In other words, we have to decide by 5:15 am what the road conditions will be from 6:15-8:15 am when our buses are out and staff are driving to school. Calling a closure the night before is easy, but when we are facing a forecast for arriving weather in the morning, any delay in its arrival time complicates the decision-making process.
Early closures are problematic. Once we have opened for the day, if we have a significant change in the weather it is complicated to close early. Because so many of our family caregivers are working outside of the home, we cannot simply put the students on the bus and send them home early, without first making sure there is someone home to greet them. Most families have shared instructions with the school on what to do in the case of an early closing, but we always confirm our understanding. This means that every one of the families is contacted to either confirm their previous instructions or to change them (e.g., “send them to the neighbor instead of the house”). This typically takes a couple of hours per school. The practical effect of this is that we have to make an early closing decision in the morning; after about 12:15, it is too late to complete the checks and we keep the kids at school until normal dismissal time.
Sometimes, we get fooled. In the spring of 2019, we had a situation where the weather forecast called for a significant snowstorm to arrive starting at 5pm and continue through that night. We were thinking that we might be looking at a delay or closure for the following day, and we opened the schools. The 5pm storm rolled in at 9am after everyone was at school, and by the time it was clear that it was a “doozey” (to steal WCAX weatherman Gary Sidowski’s term) it was too late to close (see above). Anytime we are sending the buses out in bad weather during the afternoon, we monitor the buses by radio and breathe a sigh of relief when they report dropping off their last student. And then we breathe another sigh of relief when the driver gets back safely.
We have a great working relationship with our town road crews. The only reason we get the buses to and from school safely in the winter is because our town road crews take their responsibility seriously. Bus routes are the first to get morning and afternoon maintenance when school is in session, and all of our schools have the ability to contact road crews if conditions on a particular route are difficult. And the towns help each other out – sometimes, as in the case of Plainfield and Marshfield, one of their trucks is closer to a bad road in the other town and they will cross town lines to help each out.
It takes a village to close a school. I can’t be everywhere; the decisions on delays and closings involve input from the Facility Director for Cabot, Danville and Twinfield, and the Principals for the other four schools. I am not the only one up early. But the ultimate decision is mine, and I take responsibility for the decisions, right or wrong.
I will let you know as soon as I can if we are delaying or closing. If I know the night before that we will have to delay or cannot open at all, I will send the alert that evening. Otherwise, you will hear from me in the morning, by 5:30am if possible.
Closure decisions may vary depending on geography. Caledonia Central SU covers a lot of territory (Plainfield to Barnet) and our eight towns have different micro-climates. Another variable is that an equipment problem in one of the towns that impacts their snow removal can result in a closure for one school when the others are open.
I do not make decisions based on where our staff members reside. We have employees commuting from long distances – some as far away as Chittenden County and the Mad River Valley in Vermont, and Littleton and beyond in New Hampshire. I tell our employees that they can decide on their own if their local conditions are too fraught for them to travel; if so, they are to call their school and we make the necessary staffing adjustments. I can’t close our schools because of weather in Burlington, but I do not want anyone to feel they have to travel the I-89 corridor when weather is bad on that side of the State.
My primary concern is the bus routes. If a town road foreman says the bus routes are safe, we open. That doesn’t necessarily mean that every road in town is clear and sanded, so if you live on an ancillary road in one of our towns, you may experience different conditions. The town road crews prioritize the school bus routes in the morning and afternoon - something I am grateful for every single snowy day - but you may not live right on a bus route. So, if you are driving your children to school this year, please keep in mind that you may not have the same driving conditions on your road off the bus route, and plan accordingly.
In closing
I will always err on the side of safety; I would rather have you all mad at me for closing when we don’t need to than to have you mad that we opened when we should not have opened. A good weather day for me is when the buses get our students to school and back home without incident. I appreciate your understanding.
Mark Tucker, M.A.
Superintendent