My memories of attending school in southern Ontario in the 60s and 70s say that we only had one snow day: it was an ice storm in 1967 or 68, power lines were down, and they were worried that children travelling to school might encounter downed live lines. Note that we had no school buses; every student at our school walked to school, so downed power lines were a valid concern.
In 14 years of public education (I was in Ontario, where we had a Grade 13), that was the only day I can remember when school was cancelled. In all other winter situations, we went to school, no matter what the temperatures and conditions were. We might have had two feet of snow, and we still would have been expected to go to school.
I work for the public school board here in Ottawa and I can tell you definitively that there are rarely, if ever, any school closures due to snow or any inclement weather for that matter. The last ,I recall, being during the Ice Storm in '98.
They may cancel the school buses but all buildings remain open for students who walk or who wish to attend (or whose parents drive them in!) All staff are expected to make every reasonable effort to report to work.
Usually school closures are caused by health and safety issues, which may or may not arise due to weather conditions, such as a fire, a flood, a power outage, no heat or heat wave, or an outbreak but these are more site specific and not board wide closures.
Interesting question, I was wondering last winter how other areas do it. My daughter’s school district makes the decision between 5 and 6 a.m. whether to close the schools based on information from the Department of Transportation and Environment Canada. They’re more concerned with driving conditions than snowfall amount. Generally, if it’s more than eight inches, probably school will be canceled. Last year there were several occasions where they canceled for much less snow because they were forecasting freezing rain or late in the winter when there was a salt shortage and freezing rain forecast they canceled and it wound up being a nice day. Bonus for the kids. The worst storm we had here that I can recall was 162 cm (65 inches) over two days. Nothing was open for the first three days of that week.
That’s because you were expected to walk to school barefoot in that snow, uphill both ways…
Around here they close the schools with only an inch or two of snow. Lesser amounts usually have at least some schools on 2-hour delay. This despite the fact that we’re at about the same latitude as Montreal. Go figure.
Another Sask person here: I lived in a rural area, so we’d get more snow days than the cities like Saskatoon because, y’know, it really sucked when the school bus would go into the ditch alongside the highway. Yup, it happened. There were a few times the bus wouldn’t run but school was still on, but we didn’t get into trouble if we couldn’t get to school.
Now, making us go outside for recess when it was -35C?
We’ll close school if the winds on the prairie are high and snow is actively drifting across the roadways in the early morning, or more likely, it’s sleeting or an ice storm. A couple of years ago we had such a bad ice storm, whole towns around us were closed down – sheriffs blocking roads and such due to downed power lines and trees. We didn’t have school for a whole week. Oddly enough, we don’t have ‘delays’ around here. Either you have school or you don’t.
This past winter my mom and I were Southerners in Pittsburgh with a Big One With Accumulation coming - some people were calling for eleven inches, and we watched the TV that night as the little stuff that’s the first to go gets cancelled. (Both in South Carolina and Pennsylvania it seems that pottery classes and square dancing go first.) I couldn’t believe it - I thought I’d never see anything cancelled for weather up there. You should have seen it coming down when we buried my grandpa, and it’s not like anybody said “Screw this, let’s go home.” Of course, it turned out to be absolutely nothing after the fluffy inches that fell that night. However, I’m sure there’s more willingness to close things when your city is essentially vertical.
And I think school districts everywhere do that “reaction to last time” thing - there was a huge fuss this March when people felt they made the decision to close much too early, so next time there will probably be an ice storm with three inches of frozen death on the roads and they won’t cancel. I missed my day off work this time because I was in Vegas - I was Not Pleased.
It is the total weather conditions and not the amount. It comes down to how much snow, the type of snow, the wind speed, the temperature, is there rain freezing to ice on the ground, and visibility all considered at the current time and the predicted changes. There were two bus drivers that were called by the person that decided if school would be called off. They had the worst routes which were in the Baraboo Bluffs outside Portage Wisconsin. There are twisting steep roads with drop offs right by the road shoulder.
RE: cold days…Back in extreme northern NYS in the early 80s, we had a new superintendent of schools from NYC. The temp had dropped to about -40F (no joke!) and he cancelled school. I thought it was odd because we never had a “cold day” before unless the boiler wasn’t working. He got so much shit from the parents and teachers that the next day it was a few degrees colder, but he opened the school. I guess he wasn’t used to double-digit below zero temps when he was in the city.
I’m near Albany now and it’s very hilly, so there are a lot of 2 hour delays, but school isn’t cancelled unless the visibility is bad or it’s likely to continue snowing throughout the day or there’s freezing rain. Although even with freezing rain, that’s likely to be only a 2 hour delay to allow the salt trucks to do their job.
In Winnipeg we would have “indoor recess” every now and then when the wind chill got too high. (I think the threshold was either 1800 or 2000 on the old-style wind chill scale.)
I depends on the district. Locally, one particular district closes after only a couple of inches. After driving in the area, I can see why: there are a lot of winding mountain roads where you don’t want your buses to be trying to negotiate in snow.
But it’s not just the amount of snow, it’s how well the roads have been cleared. A small amount that started at 5:00 am and shows no sign of stopping will close things, while considerably more in a storm that ends at midnight might not get a snow day.
For the rural areas, it was pretty much 3-4 inches to shut down schools for a day. There is just too much plowing to do before a school bus can get through.
Sadly, I was in Madison. It pretty much required 8-10+ inches falling at just the right time for us to get out of school.
I do remember school being canceled once for the cold - the temperature was below zero F and the windchill was really really low (like -60)
In the Boston suburbs it seems totally dependent on the ability of buses to get through. So 18" that starts at 3 PM and ends at midnight - school will probably be open since they’ve got all night to clear the roads. But heavy snow starting at 2 AM, with 6" on the ground by 6 AM and another 6" predicted, they’ll probably close.
There was an incident a few years back where the Boston schools had stayed open, but decided to dismiss the kids early due to ongoing heavy snow. The problem was that many parents were at work when the kids were dropped off by the buses, so you had 12 year old kids wandering around in the neighborhoods in heavy snow, looking for a friend’s house to hang out in. Since then, they’ve been very conservative about closing if the weather forecast looks bad.
Oh, I’m a farm kid and rode the bus to a school in a little town myself. I can recall maybe 3 days were we didn’t make it to school. Then there was that time we got stuck on the way home and were stranded on the bus for about 6 hours, but that’s another story.
Takes a full on Blizzard in the Central Rockies too. I’ve been working for county government for 17 years. Drive over the continental divide every day. I’ve missed exactly 2 days because of weather. One of them was a Non-Priority holiday anyway.
One day was in October (Columbus day), and once the day of the Oklahoma bombing (April 19th).
But we are ready for it. Most of us have 4x4s of some sort. It’s rather foolish not to. I have my own snow plow for my drive and road if the county gets backed up and doesn’t plow.
Only once have they shut the offices down (I had already come into work).
I grew up in the mountains of New Mexico. I remember one day there was a lot of snow and school was canceled and the National Lab was closed. It was great about half the town drove past the schools past the lab to the ski hill and we all had a great day skiing.
The giant increase in the use of buses is the big decider of snow days in the modern world.
Back in the 50s and 60s, when I walked to school in Rochester the answer was simpler. Snow days didn’t exist. Schools always stayed open.
The only exception was in 1966. A two-foot storm one weekend clogged the city. A second two-foot storm the next weekend shut it down completely for three days. Once you have snowbanks higher than your head you can’t pile a second lot of snow on top.
But that’s it.
Today snow days seem to happen all the time, for the reasons given above. Work almost never closes, though, so these put parents into an incredible bind.
My son went through 12 years of school in Montreal, between 1979 and 1991 and didn’t miss a single day for snow. His older siblings did miss a few days during the 70s. It is not determined at all by the amount of snow, but by the driving conditions. Not just the school buses, but also nearly all the teachers drive to work.
When I was growing up in Philadelphia, I can recall only one snow day when we had 27 inches in 1947. I think there might have been one or two others.
My older son lives in Seattle and reports that one or two inches is enough to close schools there. Also, while he, having grown up and learned to drive in Montreal, has no trouble driving when there is a few inches of snow on the ground, most drivers there haven’t a clue.
I don’t know about now, but growing up on the West side of Milwaukee fifty years ago, I attended public school from age 4 to age 18 (half year of “morning kindergarten,” followed by a half-year of “afternoon kindergarten” before first grade.) During that 14-year period, school was cancelled because of snow for a total of one HALF day. Only because a blizzard blew up unexpectedly around 10 AM, and we kids got sent home at noon. I lived across the street from my elementary school at the far end of the block. Taking my 2-years-younger kid sister by the hand, I walked out the front door of the school and the wind was blowing so hard that we actually had to duck behind trees and houses in order to finally get to our own front door.
By the next day, it had all been plowed. When I moved to NYC in 1975 and school was cancelled because of 2-3 inches of fluffy snow, I remember being astonished.
You learn to drive on snow by sliding around a lot. You also learn to never drive on black ice.
I went to college in Ithaca, New York which has very similar weather. My California roommate had to be instructed about snow boots, walking on icy sidewalks, and frostbite. And we nearly came to blows over her belief that you HAD to sleep with the window open. Not when it’s six degrees below zero outside!!!
