Snow days not always welcome for Chapel Hill parents

It’s early morning, and the ground outside is white and slushy. As parents sit uneasily watching closures scroll across the bottom of the news, children celebrate their schools’ cancellations.

For some parents, Tuesday and Wednesday’s school closures caused nothing more than minor schedule adjustments. But for others, closures can be nerve-racking.

Ruby Sinreich, web administrator for the OrangePolitics blog, has a 21-month-old son.

His day care closes when the schools do, leaving Sinreich and her husband in a tough spot.

“I can’t really bring him to work because I wouldn’t get any work done,” Sinreich said. “It would be distracting to my co-workers.”

Her husband, a small business owner, can only take half days off, so she and her husband each take off opposite portions of the day.

She said that taking days off for cancellations puts stress on her professional life.

“I have to use vacation days that I don’t have,” she said.

Penny Rich, a Chapel Hill Town Council member and mother of two, works from home.

But even at home, she said she can understand the burden cancellations cause.

“When your kids are young and you have to constantly entertain them, days off from school can be very tiring,” she said.

Neil Pedersen, Chapel Hill-Carrboro City Schools superintendent, ultimately decides if the weather is severe enough to cancel school.

Pedersen said he seeks advice from the local police departments, researches weather updates and even looks to other school districts because many teachers live outside of the system in which they teach.

“We just do the best we can,” he said. “We can’t always please everyone on each decision.”

Donna Coffey, vice chairwoman of the Orange County Schools Board of Education, said parents are taking the closures especially well this winter as opposed to past years.

“Our staff went out on some of the rural roads and took some pictures, and they’re posted on our website,” Coffey said. “Hopefully, people got an opportunity to see how really bad the roads are.”

Overall, parents understand the uncertainty of the weather and the need to keep students safe, wrote Jamezetta Bedford, chairwoman of the Chapel Hill-Carrboro City School Board, in an e-mail.

“We keep student and staff safety at the forefront of decisions to close school.”

Coffey said two of the four missed days for Orange County Schools will be made up on previously scheduled teacher workdays.

A decision has not been made about the remaining two days. Coffey said she expects that to be decided at the Jan. 18 board of education meeting.

Contact the City Editor at city@dailytarheel.com.