The 7 Steps to Declaring a Snow Day

... at least for public schools K-12 in northeast Kansas.

As a public school Superintendent, one of my dad's duties is to determine whether or not the weather is safe for school. Before students even hear the words "snow day," there's a middle-aged man somewhere working to figure out whether or not the district can hold school in the morning. That poor guy is my dad, and I'd just like to say that it's never a whim when he calls a snow day. It usually takes a 7 step program to determine whether or not we get a snow day.

The 7 Steps to Declaring a Snow Day:

1. At 5pm, turn the TV on to the weather channel. Prepare yourself; this is the only channel you'll be watching all night.

2. Pull up 3 tabs on your favorite internet browser. The first one will be used to monitor the list of local establishments that are already closing, the second to monitor hourly forecasts, the third to check doppler radar.

3. Call up your Superintendent friends from nearby districts. Place bets on which district will cancel school first. Form alliances promising that if they cancel, you'll cancel, but only if you can do this without forcing makeup days in May.

4. At midnight, if the weather still doesn't show home-run signs of a snow day (it won't,) check everything one more time before going to bed for 3 hours.

5. At 3am, wake up, check everything again and if it's still not certain, drive the main roads, dirt roads and bus routes.

6. At 4:30am, start the chain reaction of calls to teachers and administrators and wake your kids up so that they can post the news Twitter and Facebook, letting their friends know of the snow day.

7. Lastly, call the news channels and radio stations declaring that school is cancelled after confirming their silly, snow-themed passwords in the most serious voice you can muster ("the code word is 'snow fairy' I repeat, the code word is 'snow fairy.'") Congratulations; you've called your snow day. You may now go back to sleep.

Snow Day Fun Fact: Once, my dad decided that our district was not under severe enough weather to call a snow day, and that morning I fishtailed into a guardrail driving on an icy bridge on my way to school (it was my first time driving solo in the snow). My sister and I both had to get stitches, and if it weren't for the heavy metal shell of the '93 baby blue Buick I was driving, we could have had a lot worse. He felt pretty guilty. The point I'm trying to make is that snow days are never called on a whim.