Our first 2018-2019 stand-off with weather

This is a PAGE TWO* production. Just like all communications, it is optional - and with detail about the first school cancellation of the year. Enjoy or destroy. It is some rather detailed Superintendent 'splainin, to be sure!

We knew it could be coming. We watched the forecast. We saw the predicted icy conditions. We prepared, and we executed our winter weather plans.

And yet, Mother Nature still tested us.

Our "Morning Eyes” team was up in the wee hours of today assessing road conditions and bus operations to determine if it would be possible to have school.  TV weather folk speculated that delays and eventual cancellations were caused by school buses that must have been frozen. Ours were started, warmed, and cleared for the delay, but the freezing rain held on longer than expected causing treacherous conditions in many housing additions and on untreated country roads our team surveyed early and again after the delay was called.

DELAY OR CLOSE?

Tricky road conditions present a difficult, no-win situation when making a delay and/or cancellation decision.

On some wintery days, the first decision (a delay) is made knowing that going to school on time is not safe for our staff or students but going later in the day when the salt trucks have been out longer, and the sun has come up, will be possible.  And sometimes, like this morning, conditions do not improve sufficiently to make clear that bus stops will be safe.

AND THAT BRINGS US TO TODAY

Our number one priority is student safety. When our “Morning Eyes” team determines travel is not safe, and we cannot foresee safe enough travel for our most tender and most remote students, we just have to cancel. After collaboration with my team, I will always make the call yielding to student and staff safety. But parents are the ultimate decision-makers in their homes, and I will respect your decision to keep your child at home if safety is at issue where you are. A one-size-fits-all road condition assessment is simply impossible across the whole of our school district’s two townships.

AND WHEN IT IS FREEZING RAIN, IT POURS

Many weather conditions that interrupt school go smoothly. But some days pull out all the stops. Hello, November 15th.

Our middle schools were scheduled to have an e-learning day today, so each middle school principal and I communicated yesterday about our calendar policy of no school/no e-school on the first day of a winter’s cancellation. What are the odds that they would converge, right? But they did. And so, the entire district weather decision came into play.

AND ADDING INSULT TO INCONVENIENCE

The following message was sent to me as the cancellation was unfolding… From our School Messenger communication service. Oy!!!

There were intermittent issues this morning with School Messenger. The phone call regarding ZCS closing was not delivered due to the problem with SchoolMessenger. We apologize for any inconvenience this may have caused.

Remember that we use multiple platforms to communicate school status updates. We use SchoolMessenger (Phone, E-Mail and Text—that has been very reliable across the years), our District Website, Facebook, Twitter, Instagram and the local television stations.

Technology is brilliant when it works seamlessly, but it can be terribly frustrating when it does not work properly. Communicating the same message in multiple places seems to have worked today when one of the delivery systems was compromised.

IT TAKES A COMMUNITY

It takes a whole community to have excellent local public schools. And, we have a great community! This is just the first weather day of our school year’s winter. We made it through. It was not all pretty. There were things out of our control. But our students are safe!

As I wrote to one emailing parent who was, like many, many others today, inconvenienced by the weather, then the delay, then again, by the cancellation, “I do apologize on behalf of Mother Nature.”

I love her a lot (Mother Nature), and I always figure that if we are going to live where there is cold weather, let’s have snow. But I have never found an ice storm to be anything but destructive and dangerous.

WE ARE #ZCSSTRONG.

*PAGE TWO was born a few years ago when we had an entire week of snow days, and there was a lot of time to write about how our maintenance pros were doing while chopping up the ice floes that precluded school doors from opening—how we were coming along against snow piled so high on county roads that buses could go straight but could not make turns where needed…  I put it on PAGE TWO to let people know to just avoid it if they didn’t have time or interest.

Some folks, it turned out, enjoyed knowing a bit more about our planning, our safety prep, and even just the conditions surrounding our long hiatus from school that year. The description of our smart safety strategy of “chase buses” when we returned to school and had double digit below zero windchills was interesting to some. Moms and dads said it was good to know—that they felt safer for their kids in the event of a rare bus stall during a route. Dog lovers didn’t mind hearing about Stella, our intrepid German Shepherd, who helped me drive roads some mornings—and who was always supportive of my early morning decisions.

PAGE TWO, frankly speaking, was one of only a few times in my 12+ year tenure in Zionsville where I felt the liberty to lower the shield of my positional leader thoughts and efforts without needing to brace for harsh feedback. I figured that the delay or cancellation info was already delivered and the rest was for those who chose to read on. It was very clearly designated as optional—just as with this social media piece for our first weather cancellation of 2018-2019.

And I have to say that on those cold cancelled school mornings when Boone County officials closed the roads for public safety, I got to read to my dog, Stella, some of the responses I got. She just howled when I played the song that a student (young Mr. Donoho) wrote and recorded for me about my early morning chore of making the call. Stella turned her head in puzzlement when I began receiving hilarious photos of the snowmaggedden (as he called it) antics of a Harvard trained economist ZWMS dad.

I recall writing in one of those wee hours installments about keyboard courage that I was seeing on Facebook and in some of the admonitions I received to stop doing PAGE TWO. That noise was the antithesis of what I described back then as my favorite part of a beautiful winter snow—the quiet!

But I digress…  If the weather again gives me a chance to create a PAGE TWO memo, perhaps I will explore this topic a bit more.

All the best.