“Oh the weather outside might be frightful,
But the idea of a snow day is so delightful,
And since we don’t know the way the forecast will go,
Let it snow, then decide if to close!”

With no apologies to the late Sammy Cahn, I share with you what has transpired over the last day. Yes, this is part rant and part constructive criticism as well.

Yesterday around 4 pm, I got an alert for my kids’ school system stating that classes would be canceled today due to a looming snow storm. Where I didn’t feel like looking at the forecast myself, some people told me we would be getting a few inches to a foot of snow during what was being called Winter Storm Avree. As the snow was supposed to start overnight and dramatically impact rush hour traffic, school was proactively canceled in the name of safety the day before it was to happen. Canceled not just in my fair town but in a majority of the State of Wisconsin in the US upper Midwest, an area that is not unfamiliar with snow in January.

When I awoke this morning, there were signs that school was certainly canceled. A plethora of dishes and implements from the late-night baking my kids did as they didn’t have to get up early filled the kitchen. However when looking out the window, there was a mere dusting of the white stuff in the street and there were bare spots on the driveway and sidewalk at my home. Way to go Avree.

So much for the snow, and the concerns of safety that compelled government officials to cancel education for a day. As I write this it is over 24 hours from when the cancellation notice was sent, but nothing even close to white-out conditions that would make it unsafe to travel in the morning. Even as it snowed later in the day into the evening, it was certainly navigable out.

Golden Snow Days

The events of the last day are a far cry from what life was for me when I was growing up in the 1970’s and 1980’s. School cancellations would happen in the morning of the school day. Us kids would get up earlier in the morning to huddle by the radio to hear if our school system was cancelled. What was told to me years later by the assistant superintendent was the decision was made early in the morning, considering the forecast and what was happening outside their window, and then phoned into the radio and TV stations along with the secret password so some wiseass wouldn’t just call in a bogus cancellation.

This approach followed me from public schools to even college, as they were slow to never cancelling classes. Where it was always nice to have a day off, the reality was that I was in New England, snow happened in the winter, and we had to deal with it. This was the assumption I had when I moved to Wisconsin, as I previously alluded to.

Today is not Yesterday

So what has changed? Is it the litigious society we live in? Is it a by-product of the recent lockdowns? Is there an assumption that more parent are home (albeit working) so if closing classes are canceled the kids can stay domicile with the parents or families who will already be there? Are we simply not as tough as we used to be? I am sure if I pose this question directly to a school bureaucrat I will be returned with a scripted response laced with safety as the paramount concern, but not acknowledging my reservations for the kids staying home, especially as report after report continues to come forth on the negative impact of school closings over the past few years on kids performance in school.

Somewhere in the middle is a happy medium. But who wants to meet in the middle these days? Fortunately we got enough snow to make a decent snowman as secondary compensation. The primary compensation will be classes in session tomorrow.

Deconstructing Weather Related School Closings

Safety is always a concern in all we do. But the process that goes into determining what is safe or not has to be reviewed to ensure it makes sense, and take into consideration possible collateral damage as a result of any decisions made. The best place for kids to be for learning is in person and all reasonable actions should be made to ensure this happens as much as possible.

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This is from The Hot Iron, a journal on business and technology by Mike Maddaloni.

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