Clear and Breezy, 32° F
When Jay Curtis’ phone rang Monday at 4:45 a.m., he knew it couldn’t be good news. The Powell superintendent was right. It was Steve Janes, transportation supervisor for Park County …
This item is available in full to subscribers.
The Powell Tribune has expanded its online content. To continue reading, you will need to either log in to your subscriber account, or purchase a subscription.
If you are a current print subscriber, you can set up a free web account by clicking here.
If you already have a web account, but need to reset it, you can do so by clicking here.
If you would like to purchase a subscription click here.
Please log in to continue |
|
When Jay Curtis’ phone rang Monday at 4:45 a.m., he knew it couldn’t be good news. The Powell superintendent was right. It was Steve Janes, transportation supervisor for Park County School District 1 — and he was stuck in new and drifted snow, pushed by the howling winds of the night before.
Curtis was out and on the road inside 15 minutes. He saw multiple driveways drifted shut. The highway to Powell was icy and plagued by ground blizzards and near-zero visibility.
Spotters from Clark and Heart Mountain also called Curtis early to report very bad conditions and impassible roads. Then Janes called back to update his situation: He was out of the drifts, but the county snowplow that had come to get him out was now buried.
Between the bad conditions and a fear that staff and students could not get safely to the schools, at 5:30 a.m., Curtis made the call to cancel school for the day. And an hour later, he regretted the move.
“By 6:30 it was so much better,” he told the district’s board of trustees Tuesday evening. “I was just afraid they couldn’t get in safely. So I made the decision. If I had a couple of hours, I wouldn’t have made the same one.”
Curtis told the board he was already working with building principals to come up with an alternate plan.
“When I was at Meeteetse we put in a two-hour school delay. After that I don’t think we ever had another snow day,” he said, also recalling a fog delay when he worked in Bakersfield, California.
Park County School District 1 staff came back to Curtis right away with an idea of how to accomodate a delay. The Friday school schedule is already two hours shorter than the standard school day; by simply re-arranging lunch periods, the Friday could be readily adapted to a late start for bad weather.
Going forward, “we will use a two-hour delay as our first line of defense,” Curtis said. “It will cure most of these problems.”
There would, he added, be exceptions for the once-in-a-decade blizzard that lasts all day and creates whiteout conditions and unsafe driving surfaces. That would still call for a snow day.
