Now, I’m a reasonable person. [Pause for laughter…] I do not expect Northern Virginia school districts to have the same response to winter weather as do those in the frozen north, where snowstorms are a regular occurrence and the equipment and personnel to deal with them are immediately at hand.
But it’s worth noting that Boston, which got two feet of snow on Saturday, had schools open and operating on Monday, as the image above (via Twitter) from the office of Mayor Michelle Wu noted.
To reiterate, I wouldn’t expect Arlington, Fairfax, Falls Church, Prince William, Loudoun and their fellow unindicted co-cospirators to be open two days after a two-footer. But we’ve gotten to the point in the local area where school leaders are shutting down on the mere chance that an inch or two might fall. It’s ridiculous.
But as I posit now and again, public-school leaders are generally weak-willed people, and in this local area, they know they’ll get less brushback by shutting down for nothing than they will by guessing wrong and keeping schools open when the weather gets a little more wintry than expected.
The fault, dear Brutus, lies not in our superintendents, but in ourselves. If parents would put the onus on local school districts to stay open, they would. But that ship sailed some decades ago.
- Scott McCaffrey