After the recent snow day for Hastings Public Schools on Tuesday, November 26, Tiger Cub set out to find out what really goes into deciding when to call school off for a snow day. Jeff Schneider, the superintendent of Hastings Public Schools, is the one who makes the final call. He, as well as a team of three others, have to take a lot of things into consideration when making this decision.
“We are looking at the forecast, we’re talking to other schools, we talk to the city about when they think they can get out and clear the streets, and obviously the number one factor, without a doubt, is the safety of getting everybody to and from school,” Schneider said.
When it comes to safety, Scheider also has to take into consideration the students and teachers that have a longer commute to school, which can be especially hard to make in bad driving conditions.
“I think a lot of people don’t realize that we have about 100 people that work for Hastings Public (Schools) that don’t live in Hastings, so they’re driving on highways to get here,” Schneider said.
Because every storm is different, there is no set time frame for Schneider to decide whether or not our school district will have a snow day. However, he does follow a pretty detailed procedure and tries to make the decision as soon as possible so that parents have more time to change their plans.
“We usually start deciding the day before if we know that there is a bad forecast predicted, so we’ll meet up at the end of the school day and then again later that night. Then, a lot of times if we’re scheduled to have school the next day we get up at about 3:45 a.m. and we will drive the streets to see how bad it is out. It’s just part of living in Nebraska,” Schneider said.
In the case of the most recent snow day, many factors made the decision to call off school an easy one for Schneider to make the day before.
“This last one was an easy decision because they were forecasting high wind and the timing of the storm was to be during the school day, so it’s not like we could get up in the morning and make a decision. We had to go off of the forecast, and it said there was a 90% chance of snow,” Schneider said.
If Schneider does decide to have a snow day, many actions are taken to notify the seven public schools, the staff and the students.
“First, we get ahold of all of the building principals. Then, there’s a process to let all of the staff members know (a call-entry or a text message) and then we do an automated call to every student’s house and of course, we put it out on new sites and our websites,” Schneider said.
One final thing that Schneider makes sure to check and address when calling a snow day is the bus schedule. Hastings Public Schools has lots of activities going on daily and it’s his job to make sure that every student is as safe as possible, even if they’re not going to school.
“Our biggest fear is sending a bus somewhere for a school activity and then a storm hits and they can’t make it back. Sometimes we have to make the decision to tell the bus that they can’t come back or leave for safety reasons,” Schneider said.
Although this has yet to happen, many people at Hastings High and all around the school district have started wondering what would happen if we reached our snow days limit, and what exactly that limit is. According to Schneider, there are solutions in place if this were to happen.
“We have a minimum number of hours that we have to be in attendance for a school year, so we have about four days built into the calendar for snow. If we were to run into a situation where there was a fifth snow day, we could have school on one of the days that’s scheduled to be an off day in the school year, we could add a day to the end of the school year, or we could make a school day longer,” Schneider said.
The biggest takeaway is that there is no black and white answer when it comes to calling a snow day because every situation is different, however, safety is always the number one consideration.
