Snow Job

[January 17th, 2007] If storms had names that took into account local school officials' confusing responses to Tuesday's weather chaos, the snow that closed the area's two biggest districts could have been dubbed Little Katrina.

Neighboring districts made their closure calls well before children were already en route to school. But Portland Public Schools waited until 7:20 am to change its pre-dawn decision keeping schools open for its 47,000 students and their parents to an all-out closure.

In the Beaverton School District, the decision to close came even later, at 8:30 am for its 37,000 kids and their parents. That was 50 minutes after high-school classes started, according to district spokeswoman Maureen Wheeler.

By 8:30 am, Beaverton's elementary-school students were also on their way to school and many of their parents were headed to work. Around 11:30 am, some students were still at their Beaverton schools waiting to go home, Wheeler said.

"It's difficult to turn the system around, once it's running," Wheeler said.

The Portland School District, having canceled classes last Thursday on what turned out to be a sunny morning because of some icy roads earlier, called off school Tuesday before classes started. But numerous students had made the trek to their high schools anyway.

While the splash page for Beaverton schools' website at least had the latest closure information, the "latest news" section of PPS's website curiously continued to lead with six-day-old information about a financial donation from Nike.

If Beaverton or Portland needed guidance on how to handle school closures, they could turn east to the David Douglas School District. The district in East Portland announced a two-hour delay at 6:30 am Tuesday. As a result, when David Douglas decided to close schools at 7:30 am, no school buses were on the streets.

Some parents in Beaverton were calling the school day a strike before school-district officials even tossed the ball. Parent Rebecca Averin, whose children are in the fourth and 10th grades, decided not to send her children to school a full hour before officials in Beaverton made their final announcement. Her logic: "Everything else in Washington County was closed, except Beaverton."

Bobbie Regan, co-chair of the Portland School Board, said Tuesday that she wouldn't want to second-guess the timing of Portland's school-closure decision, though she sympathizes with parents juggling their schedules.

Sarah Carlin Ames, a spokeswoman for Portland Public Schools, admitted that the decision was made later than the district would have wanted. But she noted that the previous week's decision to close school didn't affect the decision Tuesday.

Due to the winter break, two snow days and the Martin Luther King Jr. holiday, Portland Public Schools students have attended class for eight out of the previous 31 days.