This blog entry is about the number one public policy issue of all time (at least if you live in a state that experiences occasional school cancellations due to snow and ice).
And that question is this: why, for the love of all things holy, do some snow storms cancel school, while others do not?
The obvious answer is, of course, snow. More of it will cancel school, and less will not. And no doubt some snarky SOB on here will point that out post-haste.
But of course, this Einsteinian observation will likely come from a person who has never suffered the heart-wrenching disappointment of going to bed believing that there will be no school, only to wake up and find out that yes, as a matter of fact, there is school.
Anyway, I taught middle school science for seven years and during that time my students and I conducted an on-going investigation into this issue in an attempt to unlock the mystery of 'closers' (storms that cancel school) vs. 'losers' (storms that break your heart).
So if you have ever been cheated by a snow storm or had your heart broken thinking you were going to stay home all day in your pj's watching cartoons, follow me over the fold and I will enlighten you.
If you have ever lived in a state that experiences snow days, then you know this story/feeling all too well. You go to bed hoping, praying that school will be called off the next day due to an impending snow storm. And you get so excited about this prospect that you wake up even earlier than usual the next day, and run down stairs like it's Christmas morning.
You turn on the tv and start searching for a local news station, with the list of school closings crawling by on the bottom of the screen. The list is rolling out in alphabetical order, and inevitably you have just missed your town, so you must now wait until the entire alphabet plays out in front of you - all the while, your heart racing and breath getting shorter in anticipation of the glorious news.
It seems like the entire state has no school - and then finally they start going through the cities and towns that start with the same first letter as your hometown. And then before you know it, they've skipped your town and have moved on to the next letter.
You scream, pout, kick the dog, punch a sibling, throw something and storm back to your room yelling about how unfair it is. I know. Because even as a grown man I still behave this way when storms that were supposed to cancel school break my heart(just kidding he he....well, sort of).
So as a science teacher, I decided to do something about this cruel and sadistic tendency of nature to break the hearts of kids everywhere. I decided to have my classes conduct a scientific investigation so that we could get to the bottom of this mystery.
All it took was a bit of data collection and inductive statistical analysis. Simply put: we collected data about past storms that had cancelled school (I called the superintendent's office and got the dates for the last ten years), then compared and contrasted the attributes of the storms and came up with a model. We built a profile of the 'typical' closer, and then used that profile to predict whether or not future storms were likely to cancel school as well. It has worked pretty well. Over the last ten years or so, I've been able to improve the accuracy of my predictions to about 95%.
And here is what we found out. There were four main attributes that almost all of the closers shared. (And remember that this is for storms in the greater Boston area - where people are physically and emotionally equipped to deal with storms using plows, salt, shovels, experience, etc., This is not for schools below the Mason Dixon Line, or out in the desert, where an inch of snow seemingly leads to days of panic and mass hysteria. Nor is it for the Rocky Mountain regions where school buses still roll through a foot or more.)
Anyway, in the great Boston area there are generally four things that determine whether a storm will cancel school.
The first is the time of year. About 85% of closers occur in January, February, or March - with the highest number of potential storms usually occuring in February. As I explain to my students, this makes some sense because we have a very highly technical scientific name to describe this particular time of year. It is called 'winter'. Closers happen in the winter. Occassionally, like maybe 10% of the time, there are a few outliers that occur in late Fall or early Spring. And the Spring storms in New England are usually monsters - like 2 feet or more.
The next key factor, no surprise here, is the amount of snow that falls. For anyone who has ever wondered what that 'magic threshold' is - it seems to be right around 6 inches. (Again, there are a few anomalies such as ice storm, but the traditional snow storm needs to be about 6" +)
But of course, this is influenced by the third and fourth key factors which are 'time of day' and 'duration'. Most closers tend to start in the afternoon and snow steadily through the night, making it impossible for those evil plows to sufficiently clear the streets in time for rush hour, etc., Then school is cancelled the next day - not that day.
Of course, this storm we are experiencing right now here in Massachusetts is a bit of an anomaly to this model because it didn't start snowing here until yesterday afternoon - and school was cancelled in most districts on Thursday by 5PM. That's because everyone is still smarting from last year's December storm that hit mid-afternoon and tied people up in traffic for six or seven hours on their way home.
It is important to keep in mind that this isn't an exact science because the decision is ultimately made by a person (the Superintendent of the district). But I've used this model successfully many times to accurately predict whether smaller storms will cancel school or be 'losers'. Like I said before, my accuracy is now up to abot 95%. And it is great when you can accurately predict whether a small storm will be a 'closer' or a 'loser'.
Hope that this bit of public service info is useful to you, and more importantly, to your kids. Feel free to pass on the info to them or their science teachers.
Update: I forgot to mention that most districts around Boston average about 2.8 snow day per year.