Do you live in some idiotic neck of the woods where the schools close the instant someone yells "snow!!!"?
I work for a school district, if if the district is closed, our office closed.
I have lived in Kansas for most of my life. I got up this morning, there was a dusting of snow on the ground—maybe, literally ¼ of an inch. Didn’t even cover the whole yard. I got ready for work. I leave. The streets weren’t bad at all. A tad slick in spots but mostly clear. I’ve seen thousands times worse. It wasn’t all that cold, either.
I stopped at a convenience store. The clerk says, “You guys open today?”
I kind of laughed and said, “Well yeah!”
He told me the schools were closed.
I said, “For what??”
....“Snow”....
I get to work, call my coworker and yeah. Office was closed. Apparently in “Weather like this” I was supposed to be watching the news and listening to the radio for school closings. I said, “Weather like WHAT? There is nothing out there!”
Apparently the roads were bad last night. I said, “Well, they’re fine now.”
I was mad, because the BEST part of days off is SLEEPING IN!! Which I didn’t get to do!
Stupid, stupid, stupid.
I think that in all but the most extreme and obvious cases, school should be open, with the understanding that absences are automatically excuses, especially for those coming in from the country. There has been only one day in my life that I thought really, truly justified closing school, and that was one morning in the mid 1990s. When I got up it was -20, and the wind was blowing like a monster making it -50. I didn’t know if they planned to close schools that morning or not, but I made my own call. It went something like, this….“Ain’t nobody goin’ nowhere today!!!! Go back to bed!!!!!” (Insert cheerings….)
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I don’t know about schools closing, but people in Toronto panic when it snows. If there’s more than an inch of snowfall in a 24-hour period, everyone forgets how to drive and even how to walk on the sidewalks. I’ve heard that Toronto has called in the army before to deal with snow, but I’ve only been living here for 6 months so I haven’t seen it yet. I can’t wait to see that happen, though – what are they gonna do, shoot the snow?
It’s not too bad here. They sent messages and announced that my son’s school would be closed today late last night. I get text alerts and I think it was about 10pm when they sent the message. We are in Kansas too, but we had about 3–4 inches come down yesterday and it was still snowing last night and expected to keep snowing today. The roads were covered in ice last night, not sure about today since we didn’t go out anywhere this morning. Some of the schools in our area actually had early dismissals yesterday, but not my son’s. It’s not snowing now, but there is still a chance for more snow tonight and tomorrow, so it’ll be interesting to see what tomorrow brings.
Weird. In Philly they closed on a day we have five inches of snow, but they did not close the day we had an inch of sleet and freezing rain. They just opened two hours late that day. I predicted the schools would close in both cases, so I was really surprised about the late opening.
Who knows what the people who make these decisions are thinking. I do know that they are required to have a certain number of days of school in the year and if they have too many snow days, they have to add days in the summer. But I bet it also has to do with whether the superintendent wanted to sleep in that day.
Ours are pretty quick on the draw here too. A good portion of the students are bussed in and from pretty good distance too so road conditions dictate the closings and it seems not a lot of snow will keep the kids home.
One dead kid on a school bus from an accident would end in court. Just saying litigation….....
Our school closed when any sign of snow arrived – although one of the days it didnt look like it would snow at all and then it just got dumped on us!!
Anyway, alot of the teaching/support staff live a fair distance away from the school and just would not have been able to get in, even if the roads around the school were fine. Therefore there wouldnt have been enough staff to children.
I do see your point though, it sometimes appears to be a bit OTT for some of the snow days. Mostly they were right though – scary driving!
Thankfully we get a text from the school to tell us if it’s going to be closed!
@Seaofclouds .. We’re down by the OK border. We really didn’t get a thing. I need to get on the text-alert thing from the schools.
@Tropical_Willie and @Cruiser…That’s why I said schools should be open with the understanding that tardys and absences would automatically be excused. That puts the decision and the responsibility back on the parents.
Also, the vast majority of the kids live in town and don’t ride a bus. Second, most of the parents have to go to work anyway, so they have to get out on the roads to take their kid someplace.
And I don’t disagree with valid closings, but this was ridiculous.
In the 156 year history of Michigan State University, it has closed twice for snow. The last time was in 1975 when we received 13 inches of snow in April. The time before that, we received 24 inches of snow.
The town I grew up in wouldn’t cancel school even if the roads were a definite danger to public safety. Considering we got the most snow in the state, it was quite a problem. There were lots of accidents before the superintendent took any blame.
@incendiary_dan The parent’s didn’t HAVE to send their kids to school. How is the superintendent to blame?
@Dutchess_III Actually, legally parents are responsible for sending registered students to school. Otherwise it’s truancy. School departments rarely accept snow as an excuse, particularly snow they already decided wasn’t dangerous.
But P.S., my parents didn’t give a shit and let me stay home. My parents aren’t idiots.
Yeah, well, I seriously doubt any parent is going to get arrested on truancy charges because they kept their kid home from school for any reason. All I ever had to do was call the school and tell them that I had approved whatever absence, and that was that. They never asked why. And if they did, and you were seriously worried that the gestapo was gonna come knocking if you told them you kept them home because of weather, just lie and tell them the kid has a doctor’s appointment. Really. You’re exaggerating.
And you never answered my question up there: How is the superintendent to blame if the parents decided to send their kids to school?
Where I live, the schools close depending on the severity of the storm. I have never seen schools close for an inch of snow. I have seen them close for a foot of snow because of the roads.
People in Austin go nuts when possible icing or snow flurries are predicted—and by the way, it almost never happens.
@shego I guess it was more the ice than the snow, but there just wasn’t any ice either this morning! I mean, we got about three inches of snow last week and nothing closed. At any rate, I’m on on my local radio channels text alerts now.
@Austinlad People do get so dumb. It’s like, it’s icy, so you need to take your time and go sloooow….but no. People at a stop sign are going, “It’s so icy out I better jump out there real quick and get this over with!” and they don’t even wait as long as they would if it was clear. And of course, they’re spending a lot of time getting traction and when they do the oncoming car is abreast of them, unless the oncoming car was smart enough to just stop and wait the idiot out. I do not get it…..
@Dutchess_III I hear what you are saying and completely agree! I feel for the parents who have to either scramble to find day care or simply lose a day at work over these wimpy snow days.
when I was a boy and lived in an area that got snow (Westchester County, NY) we had an occasional snow day after a heavy fall. In third grade everything closed because of a blizzard. Mid morning my mom got tired of having three of us underfoot and had us walk a half mile to the library and not come back until lunch time. (did I mention there was a blizzard?) School would have been better.
LOL @zenvelo!
My Mom would call her own snow days…always on the first day of a good snow she’d let us stay home from school just so we could be the first on the hills with the sleds. It was pretty cool, being the only kids out there, knowing everyone else was in school, daydreaming of sledding!
Schools in my area close but not really. Some teachers have to show up because some parents have to work and have nowhere else for their children to go. It’s not called truancy for the rest of us.
Its called liability. the main roads may be clear, but i promise you that the schools were closed for a good reason, like ice and snow on the back roads. you have to consider the whole picture, when making a school closed decision. in this situation, its better to be safe, than sorry.
This is why most people listen to radio and tv stations, when a threat of inclimate weather is forecast.
@john65pennington But I still say, in the end, the parents should make the call. It should be their responsibility. Most of them have to get the kids out on the road whether there is school or not.
There was no inclement weather forecasted that I knew of, and it certainly didn’t look bad at all when I got up…and in fact it wasn’t bad. Virtually no snow, and little to no ice. I’ve lived here a long, long time and I know when it’s bad enough to start checking for closings…and this morning there was absolutely NO reason for me to think I needed to waste my time checking.
I have a funny story about snow and school closings.
My dad, as a boy, was far more ambitious, energetic and willing to work than I have ever been (or will ever be). During the winters in Worcester, Massachusetts, he shoveled snow for whatever income that would bring to the family. (This was during the Depression, after all, and his own dad was looking for work, himself.)
One of his clients was the Superintendent of the Worcester Public School system, a nearby neighbor, who insisted that his driveway be cleared first thing every school morning. Result: Worcester public schools almost never were closed “due to snow” all through the 1930s. If the superintendent could get to school, then his assumption was that everyone should be able to.
I’ve already told my boss that I’m planning to take a 6–12” vacation day tomorrow, in Connecticut.
LOL! Well, you know, it’s amazing what you can do when you have to! In 1979 I was working for Boeing Computer Services. We had a major snowfall, and work actually was canceled. BUT…it was payday. Every body somehow managed to get to work to get their checks…and leave again! It was fun! The snow was so deep and it was just fun helping people dig out and get going again and stuff! Took us abut two hours to go anywhere. But we couldn’t go to work to work. Oh no. Weather was toooooo bad!
Last winter, my school announced that it would be closed the following day because it had began to sleet a little outside. It took less than 5 minutes for the assistant principal to jump on this. Of course, it stopped after everyone got on the buses and into their cars 30 minutes later, after school. School still remained closed the next day, and the local stations were full of it. “Snow! Yay! Snow Snow SNOW!”
It did in fact snow at my house the day the school was closed. For 10 fucking minutes. I was wearing a giant ski jacket and everything. And I got this bullshit.
All the places ~20 miles north were getting around 1–3” of sheer white unicorn magic pixie dust. Fuck you, Bay Minette.
Last year, they canceled school once, and it didn’t even snow. It was a complete waste of time, and caused people to go to school on a national holiday. In the Midlands of SC, we don’t have to equipment to handle snow. ANY snow will cancel school, even if the roads don’t have any snow on them. Also, schools must make the descision the day before the snow, and once they do, there’s no going back. Also, students here just recently had what is being called “Winter Break Part II,” because a combination of 5” snowfall on Monday and a 4-day weekend the next weekend, meant no school for eight days.
Sorry if I wasn’t clear. As @john65pennington said, it’s a liability issue. To put it directly, someone who is given the legal responsibility for children and then makes decisions that put them in danger are liable. Yes, parents also have some responsibility, but when the authority of law is putting pressure on them (as much as I don’t find it valid, it doesn’t change the reality of it), it suddenly stops being an issue of free choice, as so much psychological research into the role of authority shows.
In part this is because we’re talking about the legal world, which often times resembles the real world, except that logic rarely enters into it.
I’m glad to hear you live in a sensible place, but where I grew up that sort of stuff would carry steep penalties for the student, and sometimes the parents. Luckily, I was a slacker rebel anyway, so it barely changed anything. :P
I know what you’re saying Dan, about the idiotic legality’s any more. \
But seriously….what kind of “stiff” penalty could you, or your kid, expect if you called your kid in sick for a day of school??
nope. we live in chicago, the king of snow and blizzards. since chicago has the snowplows and manpower and overall expectancy of heavy snow since 1967, the kids go to school no matter what, as if to say, “9 inches? ok, what snow?—go to school and dont forget your homework either; see ya when you get home.”
“and after you do your homework, go shovel it.”
They wouldn’t close the schools in my area if giant demon fists were shooting out of the ground and meteors made out of Avril Lavigne’s menstrual blood were raining down from the sky.
The neighboring county, however, gets out of school every time somebody pisses on the ground… or when the school “boiler has the flu” as my ex girlfriend’s dad used to say.
I can remember walking to school when the snowbanks on either side were over my head. Everyone shoveled the sidewalks in front of their houses, and their driveways.
Now, everyone stays home, venturing out for bread and milk, even if they don’t need it.
It isn’t idiotic at all if people aren’t used to the weather and its likely to be dangerous for them. It isn’t idiotic at all if there’s a bad road or several in the county that will be very negatively impacted by the weather and make it dangerous for school buses and people taking their kids to school. If its uncommon, it isn’t idiotic at all.
@Meego Now THAT’S a snowday! That’s what I’m talking about!
@klutzaroo People around here are very used to bad weather. Snow, ice storms, 100 mph straight line winds, tornadoes, floods, you name it, we get get it. What we got yesterday was nothing. We had worse last week.
Wow…^^^^^ our school district should be ashamed of themselves!
Yup. Down here in Charleston, SC; if anything frozen falls from the sky, all government, county and state offices close!
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