December’s weather was disgusting in these parts—which is to say warm, with many days that a certain kind of person praises as “beautiful,” never mind what 65-degree temps in December portend for the Thwaites Glacier or the continued functioning of the jet stream. Not only was there not the remotest chance of a white Christmas, in other words, there was no sign of anything the slightest bit wintry—until, of course, the Monday the children were due back in school after their break.
Sunday, January 2 saw the arrival of one of those little “alert” triangles in my weather app. Clicking through, I read that there was a not insubstantial chance that as many as four inches of snow would fall overnight. I showed the alert to Petra but said nothing out loud, lest the children hear and start fantasizing about an extra day of winter break. The break's final day had been surprisingly free of whining about the imminence of the first school bell of 2022, and the last thing I wanted was to trigger desperate analysis of the true odds of being snowed out and whether we parents might consider allowing a “mental health day” if not.
If such a forecast were to come true, it would absolutely result in a day off for the children. As the planet’s fever continues to spike, snow is already rare and only getting rarer around here, so it is precious to children and frightening to grownups—at least to grownups responsible for the safe transportation of children to and from school.
There are parts of this country where school systems take very little notice of winter weather, but that’s because they get so much of it that they couldn’t function if they treated every bit of snowy or icy precipitation as a justification for a day off. In these parts, by contrast, it sometimes seems as though all it takes is a rumor and a snowflake to disrupt the school schedule. Then again, the streets of Waldhurst are mostly flat and get plowed pretty promptly, so the direst aspects of the situation are not always apparent to city residents. Our school system serves an entire county, though, one that is large, mountainous, and mostly rural. Weather that causes mild inconvenience here in town can pose considerably greater challenges on the two-lane blacktops that wind up- and downhill outside city limits.
Delayed openings are a lot more common than cancellations, of course. The only two flavors of these used to be one- and two-hour delays. Then, a few years back, the innovation of a three-hour delay was introduced, and these are pretty much all we ever see now. In fact, I can’t remember the last time there was a shorter one. Three-hour delays seem to provide school authorities with the perfect balance between allowing enough time for road conditions to improve, on the one hand, and not losing one of the 180 days of instruction for which they are on the hook for delivering, on the other. One person with inside knowledge once told me that, as long as students are in school in time to eat lunch, it still counts as a full instructional day.
On days with three-hour delays, Axl is fond of making the argument that he and his sister might as well stay home because “you don’t learn anything, anyway.” His point is a fair one, as far as it goes. No matter how much the day is shortened, there is no reducing the time needed for getting kids on and off of buses, through the halls to lunch and “specials,” and all of the other logistical nuts and bolts necessary to the functioning of a school. So it is instructional time that takes the hit, and—to hear the kids tell it—there ends up being barely enough time for even a few minutes of actual academic work.
Whatever, kid(s). The pandemic has shown us all the true value of school: a place to park children so parents can perform the jobs they need because they have children. Also, there is learning and then there is learning. Some learning occurs in response to formal instruction (although a good deal less than we like to think), but—as I’m always telling the kids—humans, especially kids, never aren’t learning, and there are valuable lessons available from observing grownups operating under stressful conditions. Sometimes you learn what to do, sometimes you learn what not to do, but either way you aren’t left empty-handed.
***
Up on Monday before dawn (how else could I find time to write these things), I saw that I had missed a call from the county schools HQ at around 9 p.m. the night before.
The local school authorities rely entirely on phone calls to communicate with parents, not only about urgent situations like snow delays and bus-route cancellations but also about the logistics of Grandparents Day, the date and time of PTO meetings, and anything else you can think of that a school system might like its constituents to know about. There used to be text and email options, but these were abandoned a few years back in favor of these phone messages, which are sometimes delivered by a robot and sometimes, occasionally redundantly, by one or another principal’s pre-recorded voice.
I accept the reasoning that, in a poor county like this one, where so many students are being raised by grandparents and other members of a generation popularly believed to be “less tech-savvy,” phone calls are the only communication mode that everyone dependably has access to. That doesn’t mean I have to like it when my phone blows up with two or three of these calls in a single night (not common, admittedly, but not unheard of, either), and I know I am not the only one. Voters around here keep declining to raise property taxes for the benefit of the school system. Although there are many and complex reasons why, I can’t help but wonder how the school system’s public image is affected (albeit subconsciously, at the margins) by its reliance on a communication method—the unsolicited phone call—that strikes many people not only as an obsolete holdover from the previous century but, increasingly, as downright rude.
***
The weather hadn’t been on my mind when I got up, but the notification of this missed call reminded me of the forecast I’d seen Sunday afternoon. Now we would get some answers. Would school be canceled? Would the children be reprieved, receive a stay of execution their return to school after winter break?
I squinted out the window into the darkness and made out only the lightest dusting of snow. When I listened to the message, I learned that, although whatever had fallen from the sky overnight hadn’t been sufficient for a cancellation, it was, unsurprisingly, plenty good enough for a three-hour delay. As usual, I wrote the news on a yellow sticky note and affixed it to the bathroom mirror, everyone’s second stop after rising.
I did feel a little sorry for the children as they filed morosely onto the school bus in the hour of 10, rather than the hour of 7. Better than nothing, from their point of view, I assumed, but still probably a disappointment and one I could sympathize with. I remember well that desperate desire for snow days and the pleasures they brought. There was not only the fun of an unexpected day off and playing outside with friends in a world transformed into something unfamiliar and magical. There was also the satisfaction of watching the grownups being shown the limits of their power, put in their place by Mother Nature.
Not only do I remember this feeling, some remnant of it still lingers in me even now. At this point, as I near the end of my fifth decade on earth, the safe assumption seems to be that it will continue doing so as long as I live. No matter how old I get, no matter how “grown up” I erroneously come to believe that I am, it seems there will always be at least a few moments when—on learning that a snowstorm is on its way, and despite the fact that, as a parent and working adult, this is likely to inconvenience me and stymie my designs for the day—I am shot straight back to my school days and filled with that old giddy hope for a world stopped and turned upside down by snow.
