Snow blunder

Big boo boo in our school district this morning. The teachers got told there was a snow day, the elementary-school parents got told there was a snow day, the middle-school parents got told there was a snow day, but the school website and public-access TV channel that high-school parents have to rely on to tell them there's a snow day? Didn't get told. So anybody without a younger brother or sister or a teacher in the family was left looking out the window and saying ... sure looks like a snow day, but if the website says there's school, isn't there school?

Nope. We live next door to the high school, and it was pretty obvious, looking out my window at the unplowed parking lot and unshoveled sidewalks and dark building that there wasn't going to be school. My daughter was working Facebook, gathering intelligence from kids who'd heard one thing or another, sharing our observations of the empty campus and trying to figure out if there was official word anywhere. A couple of local news channels said our schools were closed, a couple didn't say. The message finally got up on the website and the public-access station about the time the high school would have been starting, and after my daughter's friend had already stood outside waiting for a bus that never came.

I expect many angry, angry letters in the local paper this week. The website's usually so reliable in the case of snow closings and delays, there's a reluctance to believe it's wrong when it bears no emergency message. Whatever mistake got made, they'll have to make sure it doesn't get made again. And maybe pay a couple of high-school students to post the official word on Facebook, too.