Athens, Ga | Nov. 17 

Story Highlights 

• When it’s raining, or snowing, the biggest question on students minds is “Is school cancelled?”
• Find out how educators make the decision to cancel class.
• What are “road runners?

“Snow day, school’s cancelled.”

That’s what every student wants to hear. But it takes more than just a phone call that goes into a day off.

“We work very closely with our emergency planning commity. So typically as the weather begins to be forecast for potential bad weather then they will call us together for a conference call with the national weather service and we will sit in an the national weather service will prompt us with the type weather that they see coming and when they think it will hit and how bad it will be,” says Ken Greene. He’s the Assistant Superintendent of Support Services.

The weather is monitored on an hour by hour basis.

“We will potentially call school off, shorten the day so that our folks can be safely at home when the weather hits,” says Greene.

There is a group for Barrow County schools they are called road runners. They get in the car, drive off, and make sure all roads are safe. The road runners keep ice melt in their cars and spray to get ice off the windshield just incase their get into a slippery situation.

“We go out and check the condition of the roads. So if there are slick spots or spots that are wet that are not slick, then we report those kind of things. We come back to the central office and we talk, those six or eight people, about what we found and then we are able to make our decision from there,” Joe Perno says.