Montgomery County parents went to bed Tuesday night thinking they could sleep in later before sending the kids to school. But the next morning, the Maryland school system sent out another message that left some parents scrambling to find other arrangements.
Montgomery County Public Schools announced around 7:30 a.m. Wednesday that instead of a two-hour delay, classes would be canceled, citing lingering ice on school sidewalks and parking lots.
“Ice removal is far more time consuming than snow removal,” Montgomery County schools spokesman Chris Cram said in an email to WTOP. “The extreme cold temperatures made this a singular experience in terms of surface readiness.”
Montgomery County Executive Marc Elrich said Wednesday that had the announcement been made earlier, it would likely have been less irritating for many parents.
Referring to the time the call was made Wednesday morning, “That is way too late to tell people,” Elrich said. “I don’t know how you’d make any arrangements for your kids, for example. It’s just that could have been handled better probably.”
The school system is responsible for clearing and plowing sidewalks and parking lots of schools. The county is responsible for clearing county roads.
Chris Conklin, Montgomery County transportation director, said multiple agencies are responsible for their own area of snow removal, and that arrangement “tends to go a little bit better than when you have all of that activity consolidated into one large organization.”
He added that having one agency responsible for all snow removal has some advantages, but “I’ve seen in my experience in this realm, when you have more agencies responsible for their own piece of the network, the work happens a little bit more effectively.”
Conklin acknowledged the winter weather Monday and Tuesday was a “challenging storm event.”
“It’s a little atypical around here that we have such extraordinary cold, following snow and wet precipitation. So it is a little harder,” Conklin said, adding that if the snow is not removed right away in this kind of condition, it does harden and can be hard to remove.
As for help in removing snow on school property, Conklin said his agency would often help when there is a request for aid for salt provision or other materials.
“But our crews are completely busy clearing the 5,000 miles of county road and several hundred miles of sidewalk that we’re responsible for,” Conklin said.
For mom of three Amy Fenzel, whose kids are in the fifth, eighth and 10th grades, the last-minute school cancellation worked out fine, as she was going to be home anyway. Her kids were also pretty happy about the unexpected snow day.
But she said some of her friends had already gone to work and had to scramble to make arrangements and find coverage.
“One friend was on the Metro; another friend was about to go leave for a presentation, where she was presenting — she had to find coverage for her daughter,” Fenzel said, adding that while people understand why the school decided to switch from a delay to a closure, “So last minute … it’s hard. Makes it hard for families.”
WTOP’s Kate Ryan and Dick Uliano contributed to this report.
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