I think we can all agree that snow days are our favorite part of “school” in the winter.
However, with a new superintendent, the real question is will we get as many snow days as we deserve, or will he force us to walk to school through the snow… uphill… both ways.
Obviously snow days are weather dependent — we need snow, ice or extreme temperatures to call off school. However, as we all know, Kansas weather can be pretty dicey at times… or all the time.
Superintendent Troy Pitsch said it’s not a decision made in isolation. “Part of the process of declaring a snow day is contacting other schools in our region to find out what they are seeing as well, especially the ones to the west of us,” Pitsch said. One of these schools is Riley County. Since it is west of us, we can see what the weather is like before it hits our district.
There’s nothing worse than driving slowly to school while the radio tells you that all of the other schools in the area are closed. Normally peer pressure is a bad thing, but we encourage Dr. Pitsch to do the cool things when it comes to snow days.
That is just one of the steps of declaring a snow day. Dr. Pitsch also keeps a close eye on the weather as it’s coming in during the morning. In fact, he probably deserves a snow day as much as the rest of us, since he loses so much sleep watching the weather.
Another step in declaring a snow day is for Dr. Pitsch and the transportation director Clint Thompson to actually go out and test the roads.
This means that they go driving on the ice. Last week, one of our busses almost had a terrible accident. While it wasn’t weather related, we don’t want to take any chances. We need to keep our little kids, and the superintendent safe and not have school on days when there is ice on the roads. Even a little ice can be dangerous to us naive, inexperienced easily distracted teen drivers.
Each year, the school has to have at least 1116 hours of classroom hours. “We already, as a district, far exceed that number of hours required, so we’ve built ourselves a cushion as well,” Pitsch said. Since we exceed the number of classroom hours, I think that is a good excuse to be very generous with the amount of snow days we get.
All of these very valid reasons aside, the real excuse for a snow day is that our Call of Duty ranks will fall behind if we don’t get these days to sit on the couch and do nothing. We also can’t forget about the fact that three Star Wars series and seven Marvel movies have come out since our last snow day. We need this time to catch up.
In all seriousness, safety is important, and a superintendent faces criticism no matter what he decides on a snowy day. We know he’ll do his best, but we want him to remember how much we love snow days every time he makes the call.
The Charger 
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