School's out for...winter?

Beka Ruehle

When I woke up on the morning of November tenth and looked outside, all I saw was a sea of white; but I still had to get to school. The wind was frigid, the roads were slick and icy, and as I navigated the curve around Washington Avenue at 15mph and braked the entire way down the hill on Valley Drive, I was in utter disbelief that these were considered “acceptable” conditions for students to go to school in. 

As it turns out, I wasn’t the only stakeholder frustrated with the decision to keep schools open on the tenth. The district office received countless calls and emails from upset staff members and parents that day, and I was among those who could not fathom why RUSD had been kept open. So, I emailed Superintendent Soren Gajewski and set up a meeting. 

Although many people are consulted, Mr. Gajewski has the final say in whether or not the district decides to close, delay, or dismiss schools early due to inclement weather conditions. The school district only has two built in snow days (one of which is a scheduled professional development day) before they begin to cut into the instructional time required by the state, so this decision is always made with the utmost care and consideration based on the best information available. 

When asked what factors he considers when making this decision, Mr. Gajewski mentioned that he is in constant communication with the First Student Bus Company that handles transportation for Racine students, as well as the communications chief, transportation director, and facilities director of RUSD. Despite having no set-in-stone rules regarding this decision, the superintendent also stated that an Inclement Weather Warning (Lake Effect Snow, Winter Storm, Blizzard, etc.) that is set to occur during school hours is usually used as a guideline to consider closing schools that day. This is common practice for other schools in the area as well, as a 2019 Milwaukee Journal Sentinel article identified that most school districts in Southeastern Wisconsin consider a National Weather Service (NWS) Warning as an indicator that they should close schools. 

According to the Milwaukee branch of the National Weather Service, a Winter Storm Warning predicts that “severe weather is occurring or imminent”. This differs from a Winter Storm Watch, which is used to provide an advance warning of inclement weather without any certainty as to the direction or severity of the storm; and a Winter Storm Warning, which warns of inclement weather that is still mostly safe to operate in. Furthermore, the NWS also maintains the ability to issue a Lake Effect Storm Warning, which is similar in parameters to a Winter Storm Warning but is specifically reserved for lake induced events. However, many of these warnings are issued based on information from potentially contradicting weather models, so any forecast that is received always contains some degree of uncertainty. Forecasts of Lake Effect Snow are especially unreliable, as the nature of the event (cold air moving across the warm water and causing a small band of snow to accumulate where the air rises,) makes it difficult to predict its severity and direction.

When a Warning has been issued, the National Weather Service Milwaukee will host a conference call for schools in the area at 3:15am to provide them with a greater depth of information, and these meetings are attended by both the superintendent and the RUSD Chief of Communication Stacy Tapp. One of the biggest caveats to the superintendent’s decision, however, is that he only has until 5:00am, when the bus drivers begin their routes, to make it. Once a decision is made, it is communicated to those in the district via automated phone calls, text messages, and local news stations. 

On Monday Nov. 10, the National Weather Service issued a Winter Weather Advisory but never a Warning. As such, no meeting was held, and the superintendent was left to privately contact other leaders in RUSD and in surrounding districts in an attempt to evaluate the extent of the unclear weather situation. He monitored the predicted conditions from 3:15am until 4:55am, but the weather forecast never changed from an Advisory to a Warning, (meaning that conditions were presumed to be safe), so he ultimately decided that schools would stay open for the day. 

At around 5:00am, after Mr. Gajewski had made his decision, he got a text from Kenosha Superintendent Jeff Weis that there were 10 inches of snow in the southern part of Kenosha, and that their bus companies were having issues with transport. According to Mr. Gajewski, the original forecast that day predicted that the heaviest snowfall would be in the Chicago area, which includes the Southern tip of Kenosha; so Mr. Weiss’s decision to close KUSD made sense for his area. There was no mention in the original forecast, however, of the Racine area receiving any significant amount of snow. 

At around 5:45am, some buses were reporting bad conditions. By this point, there was still no winter weather warning, but the National Weather Service had extended the advisory from around 6:00am to 8:00am. Despite the bus drivers’ reports, kids were already en route to school, and there was no way for the superintendent to change his decision. 

All in all, the National Weather Service did not release an accurate depiction of the extent of the storm prior to its occurrence, most likely due to a combination of the narrow band of the storm and the Lake Effect. This is made clear by the fact that neither a Lake Effect Warning nor a Winter Storm Warning were issued, despite the fact that Eastern areas of Racine and Kenosha were severely affected by the snow. Snow totals across these areas varied drastically but were concentrated in the East, with parts of Pleasant Prairie receiving 13”, Sturtevant receiving 2”, and the interstate receiving only a light dusting (Fox 6 News, Milwaukee Journal Sentinel). 

On November 10th, Superintendent Gajewski made his decision based on the limited information that was available to him from both transport companies and the National Weather Service. In the future, however, Mr. Gajewski plans to take National Weather Service Advisories with a grain of salt if there is a possibility of Lake Effect Snow, as he knows very well the uncertainty that comes with winter weather predictions.