Playing It Safe

Posted by Patrick in Children, Schools, Weather

For many kids across central South Carolina, there’s no school today.

No, you didn’t miss some holiday.  The day off was arranged either Friday or over the weekend in anticipation of snowy weather forecast for much of the state.

Those of you to the north might be surprised by this, but in South Carolina (other than the Upstate), snow is something of a rarity.  This means that all it takes is the mere mention of snow for people to rush to their grocery stores and empty the shelves of bread and milk.

I’ve never understood why there’s such a rush only on those two items:  do people make milk sandwiches when it snows?  But I digress….

But apparently, when snow looked like a real possibility, school leaders decided to take no chances and shutdown classrooms across the area.

Is this a good decision?  Well, that’s the rub, isn’t it?  If it had snowed, and if road conditions had been icy enough that children’s safety would have been at risk, parents would have complained that their children shouldn’t have been put into the dangerous situation of having to get to school at all.

Heaven forbid that a bus actually would be involved in any kind of accident.

As of this morning, there was no snow where my mom is, yet schools are still closed.  At least school leaders can say, “Hey, we kept your kids safe, didn’t we?”  Of course, they’re then likely to say, “Now be sure to bring them back to school on this make-up day.”  No one wants to hear that.

My mom, in a classic “When I was in school, I walked uphill both ways” moment, told me that when she went to school, they wouldn’t close it until snow actually started falling.

Come to think of it, that’s the way it was when I was in school.  Snow happens infrequently enough here that when meteorologists predict it, it is generally understood that no matter how sure they are, snow is far from being a guarantee.

What’s better, in your opinion?  Playing it too safe and cancelling school days ahead of a predicted storm, or waiting until the snow actually starts falling, when the worried grocery shoppers are clogging up the roads in their bread-and-milk feeding frenzy?