Supt. Phillips recaps ‘interesting two weeks’ of storms
A month after a string a frigid weather caused Aurora school officials to cancel school six days in a period of two weeks, Supt. Jody Phillips recapped the district’s winter weather procedures while also advising the board on the status of possible make-up days.
“It was quite the interesting two-week period, but because of the amount of snow that we received on campus and where it was it was impossible to have school here, both because of the roads and because of what our campus looked like,” Phillips told the board during Monday’s regular monthly meeting. “There was one day I came up to school and there was literally no entrances that you could enter into any one of our buildings so obviously you’re not going to have school when that happens.”
While most of the snow on campus has been moved or since melted, Phillips said the lingering impact may be felt by students and staff later this spring.
“The first thing that everybody wants to know is what the end of the year looks like with those six days,” he said. “We are going to have to make a decision in March I believe as far as what we do because we are going to be short on instructional hours. Right now we’re looking at a day, basically, is where we’re at for that. So we’ll have that decision to make again like we did last year.”
Phillips advised the board that this is the first time he made the decision to completely close campus, not allowing students or staff on the grounds.
“This is the first time that I closed campus, number one because there was no progress that we could have made with snow removal during some of that time,” he said. “But number two it just wasn’t safe to have anybody here and we needed people away so that our grounds crew could move snow without extra cars and people walking.”
Having weathered that initial storm, Phillips said he was looking forward to returning to school that Thursday and Friday, Jan. 18-19, though Mother Nature again had other plans.
Recapping what he called “Squall day in Nebraska,” Phillips said staff had been tracking the weather since the previous night, with the forecast calling for bad weather to stir up around 2 p.m. that Thursday. Several activities were scheduled that day, including middle school girls wrestling event at Hastings Adams Central and boys and girls basketball at Kearney Catholic.
By the time heavy weather set in, Phillips said the girls wrestling team was closer to Hastings than Aurora, so the bus driver was told to continue on. Both the boys and girls basketball teams had headed for Kearney, but were called back.
“We got to dismissal time and everything was blowing,” he recalled. “It was quite the scene, so we had all the busses come here.”
All students on the out-of-town buses were brought to the middle school commons area, which is when the squall hit hard, virtually filling the sky with blowing snow and reducing visibility to virtually nothing.
“While we had the kids in there we received a call from the Hamilton County dispatch asking if we could bring a bus to Highway 34,” where there had been a pile-up involving numerous vehicles. “It was quite a scene because you had all the firefighters and EMTs and then you had Jody Phillips and Doug Kittle in their dress clothes with no hats and no gloves. It was cold and we would not make it very long outside, but we showed up and the firefighters asked us to go get people and bring them back to the bus, so we literally went car by car, telling people that they could come out.”
In the meantime, Phillips said the decision had been made to have parents come and get their kids at the school, as opposed to trying to get the buses back out on roads covered by snow, ice and in some cases partially blocked by cars involved in earlier accidents.
“I do think everybody handled it very, very well,” Phillips continued. “The kids were sitting in the commons area and they were completely fine, not panicking, and parents started showing up all the way through maybe 5:30 or 6 o’clock. As you know, we do things because of safety and I think for the most part everybody got home safely that day, just maybe an alternative way.”
By the next day, Phillips thought the weather had cleared enough that classes could resume, before learning around 5:30 a.m. that the brake systems were frozen on all the buses, which meant they could not run.