Snow daze
WHEN WINTER is upon us, there is really only one thing that school superintendents think about: snow. We continue to keep half an eye on budgets, test scores, policies, the curriculum, but the other eye and a half is always on the weather map. This is because among all the critical decisions we make each day, month, or year, there is nothing like the decision to call off school. It is Mount Everest, if you'll pardon the metaphor. How we handle this decision reveals what we are made of. It is the ultimate existential test. It is how we measure each other -- and ourselves.
Making this decision also determines what everyone else thinks of us. In fact, it's the only thing most people think of us at all. A year or so ago, several of my colleagues and I had occasion to meet with the now-embattled Harvard president Larry Summers, and he introduced himself by saying that throughout his entire elementary and secondary school experience, his only impression of, and therefore judgment about, his town's superintendent had to do with decisions the guy made about snow days. But that's everyone's impression. Far and wide, across the land, we are known by hundreds and hundreds of thousands of students and parents only by virtue of being the Oz-like figure behind the curtain who calls school off because of snow. Otherwise we are just names that occasionally appear in the local paper in articles that no one really wants to read, though generally people feel as if they should.
Imagine if the worth of your entire career were measured by decisions you had to make, alone, at 4 in the morning, with limited information, that involved assessing life-safety issues for children.
I once worked for a superintendent who truly hated snow days. You couldn't really even joke around with him about it. The man would break out in hives when a low-pressure area developed off the coast of Seattle, because he knew that in a matter of days it could turn into a blizzard here on the East Coast. At his retirement party, his wife told a story about him staring out of his window on a winter night, phone at the ready to make the fateful call, saying, ''Honey, it's pure white out there. I've got to call it off," and her saying, ''Dear, lift the shade."
The steady popularity of books about things like the Cuban missile crisis and President Bush's decision to invade Iraq suggests that the public is fascinated by detailed anatomies of the decision-making process, so I feel justified in lifting the curtain of professional discretion and providing a private look at the hows, whys, and whens of calling school off. It's not for the faint of heart, and some material is being withheld. (Example: I can't reveal the code we use to call radio and television stations. But not for the reason you think. There is only one person in our system entrusted with the code, and it isn't me.)
First, the day before. When a storm is forecast, the superintendent becomes a figure of great interest. The office, or school, is abuzz. ''Say, what are you thinking about the weather tomorrow? Any idea what you might do?" Some people are more assertive. ''Whatever you decide, could you do it early, just so we know?" These are questions that are hard to answer, because the honest answer is that all we are thinking about is not blowing the decision by being the only district closed on what turns into a bright, dry day or the only district open on what turns out to be the hundred-year storm.
Generally we have until around 5 a.m. to lay down the cards, but at that point, a card laid is a card played. That's when the call has to be made to get on television and radio and let the teachers, bus drivers, food service people, and maintenance people know that the plant is closed. But it is what happens prior to the call that is interesting.
Each of us has a little circle of friends, other superintendents, with whom we touch base to get a sense of where things are headed. This is an odd ritual involving a group accustomed to talking to one another only when it's dark and snowy out. A friend once presented me with the image of all of us middle-aged administrators, alone in our kitchens in the early morning hours, shivering in our bathrobes, bare legs agleam, calling each other and saying things like, ''Well, what are you going to do?" ''I don't know, have you heard what anybody else is doing?" ''Not yet, but will you call me when you've decided?" ''Right, and I'm going to call Bill and see what he's thinking."
As superintendent, you know that you aren't the only one awake and fretting over all of this. There are hundreds, often thousands, of adults and kids waiting by the phone, begging, praying, almost experiencing religious conversions in the hopes that you'll call school off. Why? Because a snow day is a totally and uniquely wonderful thing, unmatched in any other arena of human existence. It's when the world stops, when obligations are put off, when time stands still, when an unexpected treasure comes, literally, out of the blue in the form of a free day when you can do anything you want. Sled. Ski. Read. Sleep. Hang out. And it's up to you, as superintendent, boss, or CEO, whether to fulfill this hope or not.
But here's the trick, the cruel irony: Those of us who make this decision are deprived of the joy that results therefrom. We are in the terrible position of having the power to grant the gift whose value derives from its being a complete surprise, a sudden and unexpected cessation of our normal routines and duties. But since we are the ones giving the gift of surprise, we can't enjoy it, as we can never surprise ourselves.
Now are you beginning to understand what we're dealing with here? High-pressure work, intensely lonely, done in the dark of night, the very essence of top-down management, one person, one decision, countless lives affected, great risks involved. It's so grindingly solitary that if I could find out the code, I'd be tempted to publish it here so that the decision could be made a little more democratically, like by popular vote.
John Ritchie is superintendent/principal of Lincoln-Sudbury Regional School District. 