Snow vacation ends: Students back in schools

Bedford County's 7,800 elementary and high school students and nearly 1,000 school system employees returned to school today after three days out for winter weather.

School Superintendent Ed Gray said on Tuesday that there were still some roads in the Rover area with frozen precipitation, but it was possible to coordinate bus routes to avoid those areas or minimize the risk.

The state requires that students be in school for a certain number of days each year. School systems build some extra snow days into their schedule so that unexpected closures won't violate that rule. Three snow days were used during the recent storm: Friday, Monday and Tuesday. One day had been used earlier, for a total of four. Eight snow days total are built into the school schedule, so four more could be taken without having to change the schedule.

Since Bedford County has a consolidated city-county school system, it's sometimes the case that schools must be closed because remote rural roads are still dangerous or impassible, even though city streets have been cleared. It's not practical to close one school without closing the others, officials have said in the past.

In a non-scientific Times-Gazette web site poll last month, 60.1 percent of participants said they believe officials do as good a job as can be expected at deciding when to close schools. Another 18.3 percent said schools are closed too early, before the severity of weather can be determined, while 8.9 percent said schools are closed too late, making it harder for parents to find last-minute child care. About 8.2 percent said schools are closed too often while 4.6 percent said they aren't closed often enough.

Voluntary, self-selected web site polls aren't considered scientific because there's no way to guarantee that the people who choose to participate represent a true cross-section of the population.