By Del Stover
01/06/04 -- With the coldest weeks of winter still ahead of us, school officials across much of the nation will soon find themselves making one of the toughest calls of the year: Should they close school when snow or ice is forecast?
The safety of students and employees always looms large when forecasts predict weather conditions that could make roads treacherous, says Kari Basson, spokesperson for the Kettering, Ohio, school system.
"Whether buses can transport students safely -- that's the number one decision school officials have to make," she says.
But making the right decision is not always as easy as it sounds, especially when weather conditions can change in a matter of hours. A 3 a.m. forecast for a light flurry of snow could prove to be the first hint of a snowstorm that dumps six inches on the ground. And a predicted blizzard can prove to be a false alarm.
Because school closings and delayed openings force parents to make special child-care arrangements or stay home from work, school officials find their decisions inevitably subject to criticism, say school officials.
Once, when heavy snows closed school in Roanoke, Va., for six days in a row, someone suggested officials enlist volunteers with four-wheel drive vehicles to shuttle students to school, says Richard Kelley, assistant superintendent for operations. "You always get people who moved from Alaska or someplace, and their opinion is that students could have gone to school on dog sleds."
More likely to stir complaints is when road conditions vary widely from one end of a school district to another -- yet logistics make it necessary to make a decision for the entire school system.
That's a challenge for officials in Montgomery County, Md., where roads in one part of the 500-square-mile school system can be perfectly acceptable for school buses -- while roads elsewhere can be treacherous.
"If you live on a street where everything looks fine and the schools are closed, it's hard to understand why," says district spokesperson Kate Harrison.
The decision-making process usually begins in the wee hours of the morning.
When snow is predicted in Roanoke, a team of employees hits the streets at 4 a.m. to eyeball road conditions. A final decision is made in time for the media to warn waking parents.
Although snow or ice are the main causes of school closings, William Ruddell, business manager in Beavercreek City, Ohio, says one of the more unusual weather conditions local school officials have confronted is severe fog in hilly areas.
Although the fog eventually lifts in the morning, it has on occasion become dangerously thick during the hours when school buses run.
"We don't have a lot of sidewalks, and so we're very concerned about kids walking along the side of roads," he says. "And it's very hard to operate a large yellow school bus when you can't see the street signs."
Buffalo school officials once closed schools because of windy conditions, says spokesperson Andy Maddigan. In addition to a dangerously low wind chill factor, officials were worried that 45 mph winds could push smaller children into the streets.
And if some citizens are skeptical of officials' decisions, there are worse things than erring on the side of caution, he says.
Buffalo officials still talk about the blizzard of 2000, when the city was hit by an unexpected snow storm that quickly turned city streets into gridlock and left school buses stranded for hours -- many overnight.
It was bad enough to deal with worried parents who were calling about the whereabouts of their preschoolers at 8 p.m., Maddigan says. But what made matters worse was when radio contact with school buses was temporarily lost, and "for about an hour, we didn't know where people's kids were."
Weather conditions were so bad that many buses eventually had to be abandoned, he says. Two thousand children were stranded overnight at restaurants, office buildings, schools, and fire stations.
Since that storm, school officials have worried less about making the decision to close school, Maddigan says. "We may sustain some criticism, but it's criticism that anyone who has lived through [that blizzard] is willing to take."