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Dr. David Hopson |
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February 11, 2008 Last week there was an incident that highlighted for me yet another difference between rural and non-rural communities. As everyone is aware, a two-hour delay was called for schools in the district due to inclement weather on Tuesday, February 5th. The district has a well-defined action plan for such events that has worked very well over time. A decision on a delay or cancellation is made early in the morning (usually by 5 AM) and a calling tree is activated. Essential personnel on this tree have the responsibility of contacting radio and television stations as well as the bus companies. These notifications also occur early in the morning so that bus drivers can plan accordingly, the news outlets can place the information where the public can easily access it so that families can plan how they’re going to handle the changes and so that staff members working for the district, some of whom come great distances, can plan their travel accordingly. In a district as large as Gateway, comprised of seven towns with 205 square miles of territory and hundreds of miles of bus routes, it is important to make these decisions early and get the information out in a timely fashion. Last week this system failed. The decision was made, the phone tree was initiated and the appropriate notifications went out. However, in a manner reminiscent of brushing off their country neighbors, Channel 22 and Channel 40 didn’t post these notices in a timely and efficient manner despite repeated calls from district personnel. Evidently the stations have a ‘policy’ that they’ll only post the delays and cancellations if there are three or more schools involved—never mind that Gateway and Mohawk cover multiple towns and nearly 500 square miles of Western Massachusetts (and both districts had a two-hour delay that day). I will give Channel 22 some credit: after much badgering they finally put the delay on the screen at the beginning of the 6 AM newscast and they also posted it on their website. Channel 40 never posted the delays on the screen and never posted the delays on their website. In other words, the delay of school for thousands of students and affecting hundreds of families wasn’t deemed worthy enough to be mentioned on-air or on the Internet. Given the fact that shutting a school down due to a water break, fire, or almost anything else makes it newsworthy, but delaying or canceling school due to inclement weather is not newsworthy unless it involves a minimum of three schools (and is it schools or school districts, i.e., Gateway has 7 schools—should we call in each school independently to skirt the stations’ protocols?) what should the district do? We have written a letter stating our displeasure with this policy and our dismay that Channel 40 had no coverage of the delay but we don’t know that this will make a difference in future coverage. We do post delays and cancellations on our website but recognize that not everyone in the hilltowns has Internet, much less high speed Internet. Short of calling every parent (which is both expensive and time consuming) the only real answer is to have our communities check multiple sources and not anticipate that the major television stations will carry this important news.
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