Snow Days

The snow's been coming down all day and shows no signs of stopping. The wind's blowing, so our front steps and walkway disappeared pretty early this morning. Town has been pretty quiet except for the street crew running around with their blades.

I knew shortly after nine last night that none of the grandkids would have school today. I'm glad they are home safe and sound – or at least I assume they are! Anyway, they're not in school. I couldn't help thinking how things have changed since I was a kid.

Back then, you couldn't watch the TV for on-screen notices of school closings. That just wasn't done. I'm not even sure they did it for the KC Schools. There might have been announcement of the City districts during the newscasts, and maybe the districts not far out of town. But for small schools as far away as we were from KC, it just didn't happen – we were a whopping 70 miles away, not nearly close enough to be included in their news reporting.

The radio was always on at our house early in the morning, for news and weather reports. And once the decision had been made to call school off, the superintendent called the radio station and the snow day was announced. Sometimes that happened early enough that I got to stay in bed. More often, I had already been hauled out of bed and was in the process of getting ready for school.

Once in awhile, I would end up waiting for what seemed like forever for the bus. At least I could wait in the house – I would head out the door as soon as I saw the bus come over the hill just east of us. On occasion, the bus would be really late. Usually it was due to mechanical problems, but you found that out after the bus picked you up. We didn't have a phone, so there was no calling other families ahead of us on the bus route to figure out what had happened or how late they were running.

Things happened. Sometimes someone would get sick on the bus, and we would have to pull over while the driver cleaned that up. I can remember being on the bus when it pulled over to wait out a storm with potential tornadic activity. One really memorable muddy morning our bus got caught between two steep hills on a slick gravel road – we lost traction going up the hill and didn't make it to the top. The driver backed up at far as he could and make another run toward the top of the hill. I lost track of how many times he did that before we finally had enough momentum to get over the top, but it seemed like it took forever. We were late to school that day.

Things have changed so much. That day we got stuck between the hills was a prime example. There was no cell phone, no walkie-talkie or CB on the bus for the driver to communicate with the school. We were quite a way from the nearest house for anyone to make a phone call. If the superintendent had started tracking us down, he would have needed to start calling the families along the route (at least, the ones who had phones) to see who'd been picked up and who hadn't.

I think we all miss the “good old days”, but I think there are some things are just better in the here and now. And snow days and school buses would be on that list. It makes so much more sense now for the TV stations to run the list of school closings on the screen the night before – and they now include out in our neck of the woods with regularity. My daughter the teacher will get a text from the district office – the teachers don't even have a phone tree any longer. A school bus driver with an issue can call the district office on their cell phone so everyone knows what's going on.

It's much better to go to sleep knowing you can sleep in – as opposed to those snowy days when I was up, dressed, and ready for the bus before we heard there was no school.