You Mean I Have to Decide if We Have a Snow Day????

Heck, everyone knows it is easy to decide if you should have school when it snows. Contrary to popular belief, superintendents do not wait to hear what the neighboring districts are doing before making a decision. Unfortunately they have be skewered for staying open when other districts have closed. 

What a superintendent should do is go to the local restaurant for early breakfast and ask the morning coffee group whether to have school or not.  They always know best. I am sure many a superintendent has been roasted by such experts.

Principals generally do not make the snow day decision. This falls to the person closest to the school board, and therefore the one most likely to be held accountable for the wrong decision. Although it is a big responsibility, there is absolutely no training in any superintendent preparation program for making a weather related decision. There is also no principal preparation for weather issues. The problem is only shifted to a principal when the superintendent is not available to make the decision.

This happened to me in my first year as principal. The superintendent liked to leave town on the week-ends. This was understandable as her family had remained in the suburbs, as she took her first superintendent’s job in scenic and very rural eastern McLean County. However, it tends to snow in central Illinois in the winter, and most of the eastern side of McLean County is wide open prairie with a constant northwest winter wind.

The first time it happened, the superintendent had visited Iowa over the week-end, and became stranded in the snow. Since I was the only other administrator who lived in the district, she called me on Sunday night and asked me to take charge. She told me the head custodian and bus driver, Wayne, would help me out.

Because the high school was in one town, and grades 2-6 were housed in another, the buses would run routes to pick up students for both schools. We would switch the students when a bus arrived at each school. High school students living closer to the grade school would be taken to the grade school; they would board the bus that had come from the high school with elementary students who lived closer to the high school. It all worked smoothly when the roads were clear.

So Wayne and I met at 4:00 am to check on the road and weather conditions. We drove to all of the places most likely to drift. The roads had a slight glaze of frost, but there was no snow. The forecast was for less than 2 inches of snow. This was nothing compared to the great snow blizzard of '79. (see last week's post). I decided to have school.

Then I learned something about central Illinois winter. 2 inches of snow is not a problem in central Illinois when it is on the ground. When that same snow is in the air and blowing across the prairie at over 20 miles an hour, it creates a total white out.

The drivers had picked up most of the students when the wind began to blow. The instantaneous white out meant they could not see past the end of the hood. The drivers had radios so we could hear what was happening.

One of the buses, the one carrying both elementary and high school students, slid into a ditch because the driver couldn’t see. This happened before he arrived at the elementary school. The bus arriving to the high school had elementary students from around town and had not yet left for elementary school.

What to do?

I decided all the buses should stay at the schools. As soon as the bus was pulled from the ditch, I told the driver to stay at the elementary school with the high school students. Fortunately he was also the high school  band teacher.

The bus with elementary students stayed at the high school. Asking high school teachers to take care of elementary students was a strange experience for them, but we made it work. I don’t know what the elementary teachers did with the high school kids, but they figured out something. We kept them in the band room.

We stayed in this unusual configuration for most of the morning. Just before 11:00 am, the wind died down and the white out ended. I told all the drivers to get the kids home. By 11:30, I heard all had been safely returned home.

As I think back to that day, I still experience the absolute terror that comes from making the wrong decision and putting lives in jeopardy. I am sure the morning coffee group let the school board members know the principal was an idiot. It was that day that I decided I never wanted to be in that position again. Two weeks later, I got a late night Sunday phone call from the superintendent stranded by snow in the suburbs.