2-11-25 Cold Weather Decision-Making
Greenback Family,
With the winter weather we've experienced and the forecast for more this week, I want to remind everyone of our approach to inclement weather. We understand the challenges that delayed starts and school cancellations pose for families, and we carefully consider those impacts.
We trust our parents to make the best decision that fits their particular household—distance from school, conditions in your area, teenage drivers, vehicle, etc.—on these days and we have that as a standing attendance exception at each building during the school year. We look at the forecast and also check conditions/roads from 5:00 – 6:30 am. Generally, we must make a decision by 6:30 am at the latest to give parents an opportunity to make arrangements and before we have buses and students already in progress towards school. Last week, we were hit with conditions worsening at 7:00 am and we had to simply go extra slow since we already had children enroute. There will probably be a time or two each year when we call a delay or a cancellation and we simply don’t get what is forecasted.
After assessing the forecast, our first question is how our diesel buses are expected to fare. We buy high quality fuel and we winter treat the diesel fuel. If we believe our diesel buses will run without fuel issues and we do not have precipitation in the forecast we will lean towards a normal start time.
Of course, the circumstances are different for each household, but I worry about the net overall loss of safety that occurs when we go to a 2-hour delay and disrupt the normal morning routine because parents have to leave for work and our younger students may have to set off for the bus stop or school without an adult able to make sure they are properly dressed…and our younger students may be forced to have unsupervised time at home. On extremely cold days, we run some additional USD 382-marked vehicles to pick up students who have arrived early to bus stops. It’s several additional hands-on deck. For early practices, we will typically cancel those on these types of days because I have concerns about our older students driving at 5:30-6:00 am and having an issue when there are few other drivers out to spot an issue and provide assistance, especially in the country. I do not think we can reliably make attendance checks on students who do not show for a 6:00 am practice. For the school day, we do make an extra effort to do early checks on attendance to make sure our Greenbacks are accounted for.
The decision-making process is a bit different for snow/ice days. Again, we do understand the hardship on some parents when we make a decision to delay the start of school or cancel for the day and we understand there is a bit of a safety tradeoff with a delay or cancelation. Maintaining a consistent start time and an open school offers some safety benefits, especially for our younger learners, and that balances against road conditions. But icy/snow-packed road conditions and poor visibility weigh more heavily in the safety equation. We will also be a bit more cautious early in the season (or the first couple of snow events) when drivers have to relearn winter weather driving.
To assess current conditions, we drive our roads and communicate with other neighboring school districts. We refer to NOAA, Weather.com, and WeatherBug for up-to-date weather forecasts. Weather forecasting, of course, is notoriously inconsistent, especially with the timing of bad weather.
We will sometimes announce a 2-hour delay for the next morning when poor road conditions are forecasted in order to give us additional time for assessment and preparation while also giving some predictability for parents. The trick is to not use the delay and push the morning commute into worsening conditions--that is a tough call sometimes. When we issue a morning delay 10 hours or more in advance, there is always the possibility that the morning assessment will lead to an extension of the delay or a cancellation for the day. For any school delay or cancellation, we will issue a school messenger text/call first. Second, we will call it into KAKE, KSN, & KWCH.
Finally, as always, safety is most important, and we trust our parents to make decisions on these types of mornings if the conditions in your area are more severe than what we saw in our early morning scout.
Respectfully,
Tony Helfrich
Superintendent
Pratt Schools USD 382