Wallis Rogin

An icy windshield obscures the view of Holy Communion from the St. Mary’s parking lot.

Flushing ice cubes.

Inside-out pajamas. 

A spoon under your pillow. 

Students at St. Mary’s will try anything to make it snow. 

Last week, the snow day buzz was strong, and many in Memphis hoped they would be greeted with a blanket of white on Friday, Jan. 10. The Weather Channel reported a 93% chance of precipitation, and lo and behold, it snowed. 

According to St. Mary’s Head of School Albert Throckmorton, in the past, the St. Mary’s administration waited until 6 a.m. on the morning of the snow day to announce the status of the school’s cancellation. However last week they announced the day before, on Thursday during school. 

How does the school make that call? 

In order to get a behind-the-scenes idea of how they call a snow day as well as their plans for this year, we consulted Throckmorton for his input. This interview has been edited for length and clarity.

How does the administration decide to call a snow day? Are there specific requirements or criteria for calling school off?

The first thing that’s helpful to know is we make an independent decision. We don’t like to be the only one who calls a snow day because that looks like something’s wrong. So what we do is, it’s sort of a prioritized triage. The very first thing is, “Is it safe to drive here?” And then, “Is there a place to park here,” because they may have plowed the roads, but if we haven’t been able to plow the parking lots, then we can’t open school. Ice is a much more important factor than snow. So if we can’t get ice off the driveway or the sidewalks, that usually means we aren’t [having school] because we’re trying to avoid car accidents and people falling on ice. And then the next thing is, “Is there heat and water and food?” So that’s our checklist. Then we feel better about the decision, and we see how other schools are also looking at the situation. 

Why does St. Mary’s announce later than public schools do?

It’s not that we do it later, it’s that they do it earlier. Public schools do it earlier because they have buses. If they can’t run the buses to every single route they generally have to close for the whole district. They’re looking at, “Is there snow and ice anywhere in Shelby County?” We’re looking primarily inside the loop.

What are some technological precautions the school takes in order to get through a school day?

Generally, Sage Dining is managing that they have food. And, you know, every day we want to make sure that the bathrooms are working and the heat’s on.

Do you add more school days to other parts of the school year or take away days from other breaks? 

If there’s a snow day, we build into our school calendar a certain buffer so that we don’t have to add school days on…We don’t do that anymore, and I can’t remember the last time we added a school day back because we missed one.

Are there ever any problems when announcing an early dismissal concerning the dismissal of older students to their cars?

We really don’t like early dismissals, if we can avoid it because we want to give parents at least an hour’s notice. And a lot of our families have two working parents. It’s a real hardship to interrupt people’s work day and surprise them. We also don’t want to send student drivers home in bad weather, so we try to make a snow day announcement before 6 a.m. Sometimes we try to do it the day before if we can. But after 6 a.m. it’s a hardship because people have already started dropping off kids and they’re getting to work.

For a closer call, how would the process change?

We’ll wait until 6 a.m. and use all the time we have available. So before COVID, I started a GroupMe with the heads of all the other independent schools. We still use it, and we use it to talk about snow the morning of. So at 5 a.m. anyone who wants to is saying, “You’re going to close? Are you going to close?” But what we also do is, since there’s so many of them, we go, “What’s it like in your neighborhood?” On most snow days, there’s someone here that has driven to school and says, “Oh, there’s already ice” or, “You can’t make it up the driveway.” Ms. Jenks or I often will drive over here just to see how slippery the roads are. So that’s what we’ll do. We’ll physically look at it. 

Last year we had almost an entire week off. Are you planning to do anything different than last year if we have multiple days off?

I don’t think so. You know, we’ve pretty much made a rule that when we call the first day, whether it’s a lot of snow or a little snow, that it’s sort of a gift from God, and we’re not going to do homework. But any day after that, whether it’s one day or the whole week, that’s when we allow teachers to assign homework. 

Do you want it to snow? 

 Yes. Do I want it to snow? I like a snow day like everybody else.