Officials talk about process behind school delays

FORT WAYNE, Ind. (WANE) - Tuesday morning's cold weather led to school delays for some local districts, but others went to class at normal time, leaving many parents questioning the process behind school delays.

"Just delaying or closing because it's cold out that is not something you will see us do very often," said Krista Stockman, the public information officer for Fort Wayne Community Schools.

None of the schools in Allen County, including FWCS, were delayed this morning, but many schools in counties to the north did push back the start of school.

"Our district we have kind of a mixture," said Chris Daughtry, the superintendent of Central Noble Community Schools. "We have a small town scenario. We have kids that walk, some of them walk a decent distance away from school."

In Allen County, there's no set temperature that would automatically prompt school leaders to delay. However, in Noble County, officials close when temperatures near zero and the wind chill is close to negative 20 because the possibility of frostbite is high at that point.

"We probably never reached the temperature where we would automatically go to delay," Daughtry said. "We were very close. We were hovering around that. The biggest concern that we had going into today was making sure our buses would start."

Some superintendents say delays are tricky because they never know if two hours will make a difference in the temperature. They also risk having more kids standing on the side of the road because parents have gone to work, but they do everything they can to make sure kids get to school safely.

"Today for instance, we made sure we had extra buses standing by, so if there were buses that were running late, the extra buses could go in and pick up those students, so they wouldn't be standing out in the cold," Stockman said.

School officials said delays for snow and fog are completely different than cold weather delays. When they know it'll be extremely cold, they can make the decision to delay ahead of time, usually the night before. However,  when dealing with other weather, they wait until the morning to see what's developed overnight.