Reflecting on snow days in Ohio schools

Given the name of this column, you probably already know that once upon a time I walked to school in the snow. Uphill. And, like everyone from that era, both ways.

Some of that is true. I did walk. It was sometimes in the snow, and I did so both ways. Hills were in the eye of the beholder.

That was a long time ago, so I have no idea how crystal-clear my memories are, but one thing I’m sure of is that we kids of yore had many more weather-related days off school than our modern-day counterparts, no matter how much my generation loves to tout its toughness while challenging that of today’s youngsters.

We also didn’t have Doppler-XL-5000teen or whatever fancy forecasting gear is being used today to determine whether our young ones stay warm and toasty in their homes or are forced to brave the elements.

We had, according to legend, a superintendent whose dog had the final say. Nobody ever saw this furry ruffian, of course, and he apparently lived for decades.

Locally, superintendents these days don’t rely on weather-predicting pooches. They have legions of experts in the form of know-it-all parents more than ready and willing to splatter their thoughts about administrators and their decisions all over social media.

Half the complaining parents wail and moan about superintendents not calling off school soon enough. There are Pilates classes and trips to Starbucks to worry about. The other half, predictably, screech about administrators calling off school too soon. It’s a classic no-win.

There has been a pretty good batch of cancellations the past couple of weeks, including multiple days deep-sixed by wind chill. This wasn’t much of a thing during my childhood, when, apparently better than kids today, while not having the weather knowledge we do now, we understood how coats, gloves and hats worked.

I don’t recall, outside of the Blizzard of ’78 – kids, ask your grandparents – school ever being closed because it was too cold. And for those few days in 1978, the entire state pretty much shut down. School was canceled for an entire week in advance as the wind made things colder, created 15-foot snowdrifts and contributed to dozens of deaths.

Another thing we didn’t have back then was much technology. When school was canceled, we learned from traditional media.

In today’s climate – not that kind – we receive an email with an audio message, a phone call with an automated message, another email with a written message and a text message. Between the two schools my wife and I teach at and the one our son attends, our phones are blowing up on cold, snowy mornings.

Long gone are the days of the chyron – nerd alert: a chyron is the moving text graphic at the bottom of the TV screen that delivers breaking news – that became must-see TV on winter mornings past. We’d park in front of the screen, much like kids today spend their entire lives, waiting to see if our district was shut down.

Other than two weeklong cancellations called ahead of time – the other coming during Thanksgiving of 1974, when 2 feet of snow fell in Northeast Ohio, causing my family to take 25 hours to complete a four-hour trip home from Cincinnati and leaving me permanently terrified of long car rides – school generally stayed open.

And we never had to “go remote.” If school was closed, it was closed. Never did we have school canceled only to receive the soul-crushing news that learning would still take place.

A few schools around Northeast Ohio went the remote route in the past couple of weeks. Those with better judgment decided to let kids be kids and allowed them to enjoy the ultimate wintertime pleasure: a school day with no school.

And nobody had to walk.