MENTOR, Ohio — If you’ve been paying attention to the Power of 5 weather team here at News 5, you’ve probably been wondering if your kids have to go to school on Friday. News 5 Meteorologist Katie McGraw gets a lot of messages from people wanting her to answer that question for them, but Katie doesn’t call those shots! So she turned to a snow belt district to find out what goes into the decision-making process.
Craig Heath is the Superintendent of Mentor Public Schools. On mornings like this, he said he’s careful to consider every option.
“We want to make sure that, number one, our kids are safe, but number two, we also know that the best place for them on any given day is going to be in our school buildings, learning and getting their lunch day meals and those sorts of things and interacting with kids,” he said.
Heath said he doesn’t usually make these decisions based on forecasts. He prefers to live in the moment.
“I’ll be up early…kind of driving around just to see what it’s like out there as we make our decision,” Heath said. He’s told News 5 he's out on the roads around 4 a.m. on questionable weather days to see first-hand what the situation looks like. He drives around Mentor’s East Side while the assistant superintendent checks out the West Side, and then they report back to each other. With 7,000 students and 1,000 staff to consider, Heath likes to put himself in their shoes. That means not always utilizing the four-wheel drive in his truck.
“I’ll put it in two-wheel drive and slide around for a little bit and you can do that at 4:00 in the morning because there’s nobody out on the roads at that point but that’ll give men an idea of, ok if I’m sliding around in a truck and then I flip it into four-wheel drive and I’m still sliding I don’t want some of our high school kids out on those roads trying to navigate that either,” he said.
Craig said he also keeps in touch with other Lake County Superintendents; they keep a close watch over their weather apps to inform their decisions. We can only hope they’re all checking the News 5 app for our up-to-the-minute forecasts. When Craig does decide it’s too dangerous for school, he can usually make an informed decision by around 5 a.m. to get that alert out to families.
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