By Doug Norry
January 30, 2014
On Tuesday, a wave of excitement and anticipation rippled throughout our student body. Even with no flakes in sight, the ‘”are we going home early?” buzz grew to a crescendo by late morning. Surely, we would follow the lead of DPS and dismiss at noon! Morale dipped slightly as students remained at their desks during the afternoon hours, but at carpool spirits were buoyed once again by the latest forecast – 100% chance of snow in the evening.
Snow days help connect us to our younger years. I remember, as a young child, the night before the predicted snow being filled with so much anticipation, it felt like Christmas Eve. Too excited to sleep, I would stare out the window, waiting for it to come. The beauty of the snow day lies with its unpredictability. In our age of over-scheduling, kids wake up with nothing to do except to put on the hat, gloves, and jacket and join the neighbors outside.
What most students fail to grasp is that teachers root for snow days even more than they do. The anticipation in the faculty lounges is palpable, and most of the web traffic is directed toward weather-related sites. When we lived in Cincinnati, I remember my wife lobbing snow balls at a plow late one evening, so annoyed was she that anyone would have the audacity to clear the roads before the all-important early morning decision was made. Of course, back then snow days were pure hedonism: wake up late, go sledding, take a nap by the fire. Currently, all that remains is the sledding, and even that cannot happen without aspirin to ward off the inevitable aches and pains.
Perhaps the most difficult aspect of my transition from teacher to administrator to Head of School has been my ascension to the zenith of the inclement weather decision-making hierarchy. In the past it was so simple: root like heck for my boss to forbid me from going to work. Now I’ve become the boss, with nearly two-hundred psyches, including three under my own roof, hanging in the balance.
Probably because, in this instance, it is lonely at the top, several local independent school heads spend a few hours conversing over e-mail before making a decision. It’s nice to share the burden collectively. As one who is still recalibrating to local inclement weather norms after our Southward migration*, I have been a follower rather than a leader in this group.
Yesterday’s decision seemed obvious, today’s perhaps less so. Ultimately, not having to worry about teenage drivers was a critical factor in our decision to open. Still, my heightened level of anxiety made me appreciate all the more the note and picture that I received yesterday from Sabrina Schneider. She reported that her boys, all with Texas roots, discovered that even the dusting of snow was sufficient to create a snowman. To be sure, not all learning takes place in the classroom.
*As an aside, you might be interested in this article and map featured in the Atlantic, which illustrates how much snow it typically takes to close school in different regions of the United States. For most of North Carolina, it’s “any snow.”
