A number of factors are considered on days where severe weather is or could be an issue. Very early in the morning, a team made up of the Director, Associate Directors, transportation, and communications staff look at various pieces of information including current and forecasted weather conditions and road conditions. Should a cancellation or closure be necessary, information will be posted on the TDSB website, TDSB social media and provided to local media by a.
The TDSB is unique when it comes to student transportation. Unlike other schools boards across the Greater Toronto Area, a vast majority of TDSB students — approximately 90 percent — do not use school buses. That means, if school buses are cancelled, it is still possible for students to get to school by walking or other means.
The TDSB communicates any decision to close schools to daycare operators, which are independent from the school board. With that in mind, any cancellations or closures of daycares will be communicated to parents by the daycare and not the school board.
Before this map gives Midwesterners a superiority complex, it's worth remembering: School closures say more about an area's infrastructure than the toughness of its citizens. Schools in the South close at the mere hint of snow not because the people who live there are wimps, but because snow is such a rare event—and most cities there don't have a fleet of snow plows the way Northern ones do.
Skip to content Site Navigation The Atlantic. Popular Latest. The Atlantic Crossword. Sign In Subscribe. Click on map to enlarge. And on top of that, 94 percent of public schools offer breakfast to students, according to No Kid Hungry; when weather cancels classes, it also cancels a meal.
I reached out to the largest public school districts in the most populous cities in each state and asked them how often in the last 10 school years through they canceled classes because of weather. Nineteen states sent over complete information, and their responses are represented in the map below. The eight places that only provided information from some years over the last decade are not included in the map, and the data represents all weather-related closures, not just those during the winter.
Although the dataset is incomplete, districts that did provide even anecdotal or partial data helped paint a picture that was generally pretty surprising. I expected states like Alaska and Utah, which receive a lot of snow, to have a reasonable number of closures each year. The task of quickly and effectively clearing roads buried under a foot of snow can be a challenging feat even for the strongest fleet of snowplows.
Additionally, because access to safe transportation is often a deciding factor in whether or not schools stay open, I assumed school districts in big metropolitan areas with sprawling public-transit systems would be less inclined to close. After all, in cities with robust train and subway networks, blocked bus routes and icy sidewalks seem less daunting. This proved to be true in New York City, where the public-school district canceled classes a total of just 11 days in the last 10 years, and Portland, Oregon, where district-wide closures have eaten just nine days off the calendar in the last nine years.
On the other hand, Boston Public Schools had 19 weather-related closures in the past four school years, and in Washington, D.
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