Seeing “Cannon Falls High School- closed” glide across the banner of the Fox News channel makes students leap with joy; they have a free day full of possibilities. While it may feel like winning the lottery for the students, the decision is not nearly that random. It’s a tough call that our superintendent, Beth Giese, has to make after lots of deliberating late at night and in the wee hours of the morning. She doesn’t get the luxury of sleeping all through the night just dreaming of getting a snow day.

         The ideal snow day situation would be everyone getting notified the night before, then maybe she would get some sleep, but superintendent Geisel commented that, “it (the weather) rarely cooperates.” Weather is constantly shifting and even the experts have difficulties predicting the exact where’s and when’s. If the middle of the night doesn’t give her any insight to whether or not there should be a delay or cancellation, she must wake up long prior to the crack of dawn, 4 a.m the next morning, and test drive the roads. Here Mrs. Giese has a little over an hour to come to a decision. At this point, the earliest commuters to our school: bus drivers, kitchen staff, and Cannon Kids workers are almost ready to come start their day unless told otherwise. So Mrs. Giese hinted that a handy rule of thumb is that “if it’s not posted by 5:20 a.m., don’t turn off your alarm, you’re coming to school.”

       The biggest factor she mentioned is ice. Buses are “like big tanks” when it comes to pushing through the snow, but ice is tricky to handle. Buses aren’t her only concern, a whole parking lot full of students drive themselves to school and new drivers especially need to be taken into consideration. In school, safety always comes first. Extremely cold temperatures and winds can also be a safety hazard. According to Superintendent Giese, “the air temperature needs to be -25 degrees or a windchill of -45 degrees” in order to be automatically deemed a snow day.