Noble Brigham ‘20
On the night of a snowstorm, many EA students look forward to the fateful email from the Episcopal Academy announcing that school will be closed for a snow day. Though snow days are a quintessential winter highlight for many EA students, many are unaware of the process behind the decision to close school.
T.J. Locke, the Greville Haslam Head of School, is ultimately for responsible for determining whether or not school will be open. “I have a little command center set up where I’ve got all the bookmarks of all the public schools that are around here,” says Locke. “I’m constantly checking what they’re doing: West Chester, TE, Radnor, Lower Merion, Great Valley, Swarthmore—all the area schools…I keep checking their websites. All of a sudden, all the public schools close, and then we [the private schools] decide that we’re all going to close, so then the decision is easy.” Locke considers the input of many others while making his decision. “I’ve got a text chain with the people here,” says Locke, “like Mr. Notaro and the grounds crew…and a text chain with all the heads of the other independent schools.”
Though Locke addresses input from the students themselves with a grain of salt, he likes to joke around with those who plead with him for a closing. Locke says, “One girl emailed me this year that she had done every superstition possible and said, ‘Please can we have a snow day?’ Then we did, and I wrote back, ‘You did it!’”
The process of deciding to close school involves much uncertainty. Locke admits, “It’s almost impossible to make a perfect decision. I never sleep on nights with snow.” The EA community is rarely notified the evening before a storm because of the uncertainty of the weather. Locke says, “One time we made the call the night before, and the weather changed by morning…We looked like we didn’t know what we were doing.”
EA Facilities and Operations is in charge of clearing roads and walkways across campus, making sure that hazards such as falling ice are accounted for. Mark Notaro, Director of Operations, says, “Sometimes in the morning, Dr. Locke hasn’t made a decision about the delay or cancellation, so we still have to work as if school’s going to open—sometimes until the last minute.” Matthew Kerns, who is in charge of the EA grounds, says, “We find out the same time that the students find out they have a snow day…Our anticipation is always to have school open by 7 a.m. when people are arriving. At four or five o’clock in the morning, we’re getting campus open.” The maintenance crew sometimes has to begin even earlier to make the campus adequately safe before school. Locke says, “The other morning, the crew was planning on coming in at 2 a.m. to make sure that we could be ready if I wanted to open school on time.”
The maintenance crew varies the equipment used depending on the texture of the snow. To clear light and fluffy snow, they use rotating brushes mounted on the front of the small tractors, which clear snow using blowers. If the snow is wet and heavy, they use plows and clear stairs with shovels. They sometimes wait a few hours before clearing to avoid ice formation, particularly when the reports call for frozen rain. However, their ability to remove snow rarely influences EA’s snow day decision process, with road conditions and district bus schedules being the main factors contributing to school closings.
While EA typically uses a combination of snow days and two-hour delays to keep the number of school closings under ten, the former mandatory 170-day school year limited EA to eight snow days. Long strings of snow days in 1978, 1994 and 1996 merited Scholium articles and resulted in scheduling changes, such as holding classes on Memorial Day and even cancelling winter exams.
The 1996 article details former Head of School Jay Crawford’s snow day decision process. He would watch various television stations and look to see if the tree in his yard had iced—if it had, he would usually call a snow day. Occasionally, EA’s two semi-independent campuses, Devon and Merion, needed to be open and closed on different days. To spread the word, parents and teachers would inform each other through chains of phone calls. Mark Luff, Middle School English Teacher and longtime member of the EA community, misses the former excitement of the phone-chains. Luff says, “You would go to bed that night waiting for the phone to ring…It would ring at 5:30 and you’d say, ‘yeah!’ Now you just wait for a ping on your phone, and that’s not quite as exciting.”
Currently, EA students and faculty have mixed feelings about school closings. Raeleen Keffer-Scharpf ‘20 says, “I really like snow days because it give us a break in the week, but I also feel that it adds more stress because you miss a day that everybody does. So you can’t make up the class; you just have to push through.” Sarah Huang ‘20 remarks, “It depends on the class, some people have better organization than others.” Neera Raychaudhuri ‘20 believes that the negative effects of snow days have diminished this year. “I think that it was a lot more difficult last year when we had J-Term instead of May-Term because we already lost those two weeks before school started,” says Raychaudhuri. “From an AP standpoint, it is much easier to tolerate snow days classes-wise because we have more time to prepare.”
On the other hand, many appreciate the unplanned nature of snow days. Raychaudhuri says, “A snow day guarantees that nothing else is going on during the day, so unlike weekends where you sometimes overload yourself with extracurriculars, snow days are the one time—because they are unexpected—that truly provide breaks for kids.” Kris Aldridge, Upper School History Teacher and Form Dean, says, “I love snow days because they are spontaneous. They sort of remind you that you’re not in charge of anything.”