its just hitting us now in Northants shame it wasn't an hour ago i could have worked from home
We have snow YAY!!! but only just started to come down, so i am at work
Snow here this morning, took a decision not to attempt to drive along with a few teachers and HT said not to risk it. School is open but I guess they're managing without us.
School closed - [ I was asked to come in ]- view from my window about an hour ago: [ it's now worse, much worse ]
Had I been able to get on the internet this morning, I would have sadly stated that not only did we not have snow here, but that I didn't even have to scrape the car this morning....The bad weather predicted for here missed us completely.
BUT..it is snowing now and has been for the past hour. Woohooo!!!
Due to turn to sleet by lunchtime though, worse luck.
Within 5 mins of snow starting (and it isnt heavy), we had phone calls from parents asking if we were going to close the school!
Snow day here. No snow where I am, but supposedly higher up in the town there is plenty. Plus most of our staff live on Exmoor or in Taunton - where there is a lot of snow. Doesn't mean no work though.
Dorset Snow! We're all off home at 12.15 - Woohooo!
So, things were in place:
- early am call to get the website updated with a "we're closed" message
- message sent to local radio station
- Parentmail contacted with relevant information
All done nice and early, we're ahead of the game.
Let's see how we did:
- local radio station an early casualty, web server collapsed under load
- school website died soon after, along with all the others in Herts learning grid that I tried
- sometime later, Herts webserver cames back online but was returning the homepage for a different school. And not just for us, I tried numerous North Herts schools and all were showing the homepage for this one primary school in Hemel Hempstead.
Presumably the people at St Rose's were unaware of this, and will be absolutely floored when they next review their hit count :-)
- and at 10:59am, I get an email from Parentmail telling me that the school is closed.
So, after much planning, expenditure of time, effort and money, the message was spread in the old fashioned way, by parents ringing each other up and spreading the word.
Why do we bother?
We use a text messaging system here to spread the word, and it's a good job that we were open (in a way, I'd rather we had been closed though!) because the text message that was sent at around 7am didn't reach some staff until 11am and some still haven't received it. Reception took over 300 calls from parents before 8.30 and have been working through answering machine messages since... Why can't this country handle the 'extremities' (actually very mild compared to elsewhere in the world) of any kind of weather?
We have our new text messaging service up and running - so just as I was thinking of rolling out of bed this morning, I had a text to tell me not to bother!
Quick check on the net to see that the feeder I was meant to be at was also closed...
Back to the warm confines of bed
Well, until now anyway!
Whole of plymouth is shut down, well all but one school, luckily not mine! 1st time in about 15 yrs scince my school was closed due to snow and weve not had this sort of snow for just as long!
Just been out for my lunchtime walk to find that the docks in Preston have frozen solid!
Originally Posted by localzuk
Sorry, but how? Blood southern pansies!
Might take my ice skates up later!!
It has now stopped snowing and is starting to melt. BUT it is chaos here as kids have been ringing their parents and saying things like " the school is about to close", and "others are going home" and asking the parents to come and get them. Which they have - even thought there is NO reason to. Mind you, most of the local schools have wimped out and closed - I can't see why - this is ridiculous even for the effete south.
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