Public school students in Madison might get more days off this winter.
If wind chill brings temperatures down to minus 25 degrees, Madison Metropolitan School District officials will consider giving children the day off. The old standard of minus 35 degrees coincided with the National Weather Service guidelines for a wind chill warning.
District officials will also announce temperature-related closings the night before rather than the morning of.
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“Fortunately, cold weather is more predictable 12 to 16 hours in advance than certainly snow would be,” said Mike Barry, assistant superintendent of business services for the MMSD. “So this standard of trying to make this announcement by 9 p.m. the night before applies to these extreme cold situations.”
Jon Bales, who leads the Wisconsin Association of School District Administrators, said Madison and other large urban districts are often outliers when it comes to these kinds of changes.
“I don’t know if we’ll see a trend in that,” Bales said. “Frankly, districts are probably pretty comfortable with their current circumstances.”
MMSD’s Barry said the change in Madison was made after looking at data from days where school stayed in session with temperatures close to minus 35 degrees.
“We noticed on days like that our actual enrollment or actual attendance on such days was noticeably lower than it would be on a typical day,” he said.
Most school calendars in Wisconsin already account for three winter weather cancellations. If the school district cancels school more than three days, missed class time will be made up in the spring.
“We did look at our data from the past 10 years and tried to create retroactively an impact assessment of what would have happened if we used this new guideline of minus 25 degrees instead of minus 35 degrees,” Barry said. “We found on average it might result in one day per year each year of additional closings due to extreme cold.”
Winter weather in Wisconsin is expected to be mild this year due to El Niño.
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