The Weather Day That Wasn’t.

Dear Parents and Friends of CCS,

I pray this edition of the Parent News finds you walking in the safety of the Lord Jesus Christ.

This has been an incredible few days, especially on the weather front.

I specifically want to thank each of you for your understanding and patience during all of the recent required adjustments to schedule.

I know that when schools close for any reason there is a ripple effect throughout the community.

This is especially true when the predictions by our weather services turn out to be very, very wrong.

All of this is exacerbated by the fact that parents often have students at different schools, and have a well-developed pickup pattern in place that generally works well.

Any disruption to that pattern can be a real hassle. Also, many families have working parents, which also makes unexpected changes to school routines especially problematic.

This is especially true when repeated incidents occur, as has been the case this month - by anyone’s estimation an unusual one for severe weather.

Also, from the school’s perspective, there is much work that we need to accomplish each day with our students as well, and closing school creates an internal disruption as well.

Please know that the leadership of Community Christian School takes these decisions very seriously, and weighs all of these factors prayerfully and carefully before decisions are made.

It might be helpful to summarize the factors that we consider in making these decisions:

Generally we follow the Leon County Schools as they make decisions, since a number of our families have students at public schools as well. There may be exceptions to this, but they are rare.
Our highest priority is the safety of our students and our faculty and staff. Our families in general are spread out over a wide geographic territory, and if our employees cannot make it to school safely, even if the weather is acceptable on campus, we wouldn’t be able to staff the school properly.
A potential power outage or flooding at school would create an unsafe environment for students and employees. Since this is our highest priority, anything that could potentially cause harm would cause us to err on the side of caution by closing the school.
As stated earlier in this article, the mitigating factors of convenience and the many responsibilities our families carry are considered as well. In reality, though regrettable, they cannot outweigh the safety factors of the students.
Our Seniors, Juniors and some Sophomores drive to school, and they incur greater risks when driving in inclement weather conditions.
Weather is changeable, and even reputable sources can disagree as to the timing and severity of the incoming weather (or just miss it completely). This was the case with the recent round of storms. We normally access five or more sources, including the National Weather Service, NOAA and reports from Leon County Schools as well as various local weather sources. We then triangulate and evaluate these sources in order to synthesize the best information available.

We will continue to work toward improving our response to these events, even while realizing that weather prediction is (obviously) not an exact science, and that there is much that is out of our control.

We are praying for the CCS families who are still without power, and who have experienced severe damage to homes and businesses due to tree-fall, flooding and other factors.

Finally, we recognize that as we do all we can from a human perspective, God is faithful and trustworthy, and He will continue to be with us and to be our strong tower in the various storms we encounter in this life.

May God continue to watch over us all, and may he be greatly glorified in our response.

For CCS and the Kingdom,

Tom