Winter weather and emergency closure arrangements – should they be required!
As we enter the winter period with changing and challenging weather forecasts. I thought it helpful to remind you of our plans and procedures should we need to adapt our normal operations. We have plans for a number of scenarios:
- Opening as normal (adjusting routines to suit weather challenges)
- Opening later than normal to enable roads to clear and the site be made safe for students and staff
- Giving advance notice of site closure due to forecast and risks around travel/site safety and/or potentially insufficient staffing to supervise students safely
- Closing during the school day if weather worsens and bus companies instruct us of their plans to collect early
We have experienced and managed each of the above scenarios in recent years and whichever decision we have made has received both praise and criticism from different quarters. It is never easy to predict our weather, and our road system in this area does not cope well with snow! Our ideal is clearly to open as normal. Our most challenging scenario is closing during the school day when staff, parents and students are reacting quickly with limited notice and higher risk transport routes to get people home safely. Therefore, you may think at times we are a little cautious. However, we want families to at least have some time to plan ahead and we want students and staff to be safe, even if this means working from home on a rare and infrequent day.
19/11/2024:
At present, I am not sufficiently confident to make an advance closure decision. Therefore, I do not anticipate making a definitive announcement today due to the changing/improving forecast throughout Tuesday. I will make any final decision early tomorrow morning, basing this on local site reports, transport providers and updated weather forecasts.
Any notifications of advance closure will be sent to parents no later than 6.30am tomorrow. We will send an ‘open as normal’ message just to remove any doubt.
All alerts and messages will be sent via text, email and posted on our website.
Let us hope that the next few days and the winter season ahead are without weather challenges (or if there are, they at the weekend or during the festive break!).
Yours faithfully
Mr S Garrity
