Lack of Foresight by AACPS in Weather Response?

Submitted by Matthew Fisher

Three things come to mind in today’s AACPS website posting about the weather  –  

First:  “At that time, incidentally, most other school systems around us were also planning an on-time arrival for students and staff.” 

Yet all those other school systems were able to respond in a more dynamic way, and take into account the changing situation when they delayed or cancelled school.  Any specific reason that AACPS was not able to respond in a similarly dynamic way to the situation?

Second:    “The change in weather between 5 and 6 a.m. put us in a difficult position.”  

Guess what? This change and weather occurred pretty much just when the consensus of weather forecasters predicted it would.

Third:  “The complexity of our bus transportation and operational system prevent a change in school operation plans at that point. They also prevent AACPS from having one set of students (high school students, for example), go to school on time and others delayed by two hours.”  

Why would that be? You could easily have done a split arrival time with some schools having a one or two hour delay.  If the High School students go in on time, and then things are delayed…busses have an extra one or two hours to either catch up on their routes (since our elementary school bus was 45 minutes late this morning, they would have been ok). There is no logic that I can see that would justify your statement, with one exception. That exception is based on contracts and cost. 

For a school district that has historically been overly paranoid about even chances of poor weather, the response today for an event that played out pretty much as was expected was rather …curious.