Closure confusion frosts parents

o Besides television and radio outlets, websites, Facebook and Twitter, Clark County’s biggest school districts still offer a basic means to pin down school closures or delays: The old-fashioned telephone hotline.

o Evergreen: 360-604-3637 (“There are no messages at this time” means status quo, no closure/delay).

o Vancouver: 360-313-1401 (or 313-1234, press “1” for emergency updates).

o Battle Ground: 360-885-5343.

The word on school updates

o “No news means we’re open.” Carol Fenstermacher, Evergreen Public Schools spokeswoman.

o “No news is no news, basically. This is an announcement when the schedule has changed from the norm.” Pat Mattison, Vancouver Public Schools spokeswoman.

o “Status quo is, you go to school five days a week unless it’s a holiday. Barring news, that would be the assumption.”

Gregg Herrington, Battle Ground Public Schools spokesman.

Evergreen Public Schools caught heat on an icy Tuesday morning for doing nothing.

Not so much for declining to keep schools closed, or delay their opening by a few hours, as most districts had. (That’s a hot debate anytime there’s a Vancouver-Portland weather “event” — and no different this time.)

No, much of Tuesday’s grief from several parents who phoned, e-mailed or posted comments on Evergreen’s Facebook page instead centered on this: Why hadn’t the district put out any affirmative message that, Yes, schools will open at the usual time?

The district’s answer: “No news is no news” — a mantra parents and students would be wise to consign to memory.

Meaning that, families should expect the status quo, that school buses and buildings will operate as normal — unless they hear otherwise.

“We don’t put anything up, if we’re open,” said Carol Fenstermacher, Evergreen district spokeswoman.

Other districts may have decided sooner, even by Monday evening, to delay or shut down classes. But Evergreen bus managers and Superintendent John Deeder determined early Tuesday that east Vancouver and Orchards streets were passable enough for school buses and most children to arrive safely.

“You’ve got to wait” to see actual morning conditions, Fenstermacher said about the district’s historically late-breaking weather decisions.

Until there’s an actual alert, the default for to all concerned is: business as usual.

Standard procedure

On that count, Evergreen isn’t alone. Battle Ground and Vancouver district officials said they, too, would just about never issue an “open per usual” message.

Here’s why: All Clark County school districts — as do about 350 public and private schools and colleges in the greater Portland metro area — are clients of the FlashAlert Newswire operated the past 31 years by Camas resident Craig Walker.

Walker oversees an online network that serves about 500 total clients, including police and fire agencies, to rapidly transmit breaking news or major announcements to local newspapers and electronic media, such as Portland’s radio and television stations. He’s become the go-to man for “Storm Team” anchors and morning DJs.

On a frenetic day such as Tuesday, there’s just no room for “open per usual” messages.

“That is correct,” Walker said. Some years ago, a few school districts posted just such a notice following a big snowfall, and chaos quickly ensued, he explained.

“It kind of opened Pandora’s Box: Do you post every time, the day after (a storm)” that schools are back to normal? Walker said. Local school superintendents agreed to not post in cases of a regular schedule, he said. Otherwise, his updates would be clogged by dozens of superfluous messages.

“Evergreen’s following the policy we’ve had for 31 years I’ve been doing this,” Walker said.

Computer glitch

Another wrinkle: Evergreen and Vancouver districts (among others) use Walker’s system to send e-mails or text messages to parents who sign up for electronic notice, he said.

As it now stands, any word sent by that means also trips the FlashAlert network, which would create the undesired traffic jam. FlashAlert “would be posting it to the media at the same time,” he said.

Worsening matters on Tuesday was an ill-timed computer server crash that froze FlashAlert updates in the critical hour between 5:30 and 6:45 a.m., Walker said.

It turns out KGW-TV in Portland had linked directly to his network, rather than downloading each update file. Tens of thousands of web viewers flooded directly onto FlashAlert and crashed Walker’s system before his designer “did a redesign on the fly,” he said.

The problem has since been rectified, he said.

Parents have say

None of this would keep Evergreen from posting its own website or Facebook update of “business as usual,” meanwhile. That didn’t happen until about 8 a.m. when several complaints prompted the district to act.

Fenstermacher said she, Deeder and other district leaders will “sit down and look at this, if we need to do this in the future. But it will never be put in the (mass) media,” she emphasized.

To be sure, parents still have the last word on whether their children should brave slippery sidewalks or streets, Fenstermacher said. Obviously, road conditions may differ across the large district that serves more than 26,000 students.

“Parents need to do what’s best for their kids. They have the prerogative,” Fenstermacher said. Parents do need to contact the school about a child kept at home, otherwise an absence will be marked and a robo-telephone call generated, she said.

On Tuesday, Evergreen chose not to burn a snow day during what may prove to be a hard, difficult winter — nor to push back start times on a morning when the temperature would stay well below freezing.

Recent events where local students have been killed or badly injured in snow-related accidents aren’t far from mind.

“The reality is, for a day like today, the safest place for a kid to be is at school,” Fenstermacher said.