By TRICIA NEAL and SUSAN WHEELDON, CJ Staff Writer
Pulaski Countians awoke to the sound of pouring rain — not the expected sight of a blanket of snow — yesterday morning, leaving school officials scratching their heads over whether to call off school.
Pulaski County school leaders opted to cancel classes for the entire day, believing that it would be better to keep students and bus drivers home from the beginning than to create potential chaos by dismissing when the looming bad weather hit.
When the rain changed to fast-accumulating snow, though, turning the wet roads into slippery, slushy messes within about an hour’s time, other school district leaders chose to send their students home early.
The Science Hill and Somerset Independent school districts both dismissed their students before noon.
“We had been in contact with several surrounding districts and had heard that there was snow coming from the north — Waynesburg and Glasgow,” said Science Hill Independent principal and transportation director Rita Presley.
School was dismissed at 11 a.m., and all the students were gone by 12:30 p.m., Presley said.
Many students were taken home on school buses; however, the last busload of children — headed to the Mill Hill area of West Ky. 635 — was detained at the school when officials learned road conditions there were dangerous.
“There had been some wrecks on the hill,” Presley said, “so we made calls to parents, and they made arrangements to have their children picked up.”
Two students were delivered to their homes by the Science Hill police force — an event that isn’t uncommon in the small town.
“Our city police work very well with us,” Presley said.
“You can never tell what the weather is going to do,” Presley continued.
“All of our parents were very accommodating.”
Somerset Independent Schools followed closely behind Science Hill’s closing, dismissing students at 11:30 a.m.
“We had been watching the weather for the snow to start falling,” Somerset Superintendent Dr. Teresa Wallace said yesterday afternoon.
“There were indications that the temperature was going to drop to 30 degrees by 3 p.m., so we didn’t think the streets would get any better.”
Wallace said temperatures were supposed to be very low overnight, but she didn’t yet know whether school would be canceled on Thursday.
“There is a lot of water on the roads. Hopefully that won’t freeze tonight,” she said.
“Our bus drivers start looking at the roads around 3:30 to 4 a.m., and we try to decide by 6 a.m. whether to have school.”
Pulaski County Schools Superintendent Tim Eaton said deciding to let school out yesterday morning was a very difficult call.
He said the temperature on the north end of county was a few degree colder, at 32 degrees, than other parts of the county, and he and other officials looked at the predicted snow for Pulaski County coupled with the fact that there could be debris in the road where limbs had fallen. Also on Tuesday, there had been several power outages throughout the day, so they decided to cancel.
“Our biggest fear was the winter storm predicted to come at mid-day,” said Eaton.
He explained that he realized it was raining Wednesday morning, but with the prediction of snow, they were trying to avoid the possibility of dismissing at mid-day.
Pulaski County School System buses travel approximately 7,000 miles a day with 5,800 students riding the buses.
“It is a major undertaking with our size district to let school out early,” said Eaton.
In that situation, he said, there can be panic and communication issues. It also puts student drivers as well as parents on the road, trying to get the more than 7,000 students in the district to their homes, many in outlying areas.
“It’s something we try to avoid and today would have been one of those days, if we’d had school,” said Eaton on Wednesday.
Eaton said, however, if bad weather comes during the school day, they also try to look at whether the situation will be better by the end of the day.
“We would never make a decision to turn out school when the roads were treacherous and unsafe,” said Eaton. “We’d rather err on the safe side before we release children.”
The Pulaski County School System also missed school on Tuesday after ice fell in the early morning hours.
Eaton said he and other officials decided to cancel school after checking the roads and having concerns about bridges and overpasses, as well as anticipating issues with debris in the roads.
“While the roads weren’t solid sheets of ice, there were (slick) places in the lower lying areas,” said Eaton, “because of the temperature variance.”
Today, students in the Pulaski County School System received another day out of school, as officials made the decision by early evening Wednesday to dismiss school on Thursday.
Eaton said they found areas where there would be issues for the buses, especially in the north and east ends of the county.
Today makes the eighth day of school the Pulaski County School System has missed for inclement weather. Eaton said at this time, students will have to make up five days at the end of the school year, as three snow days were already built into the calendar.
