Kansai area school officials are weighing whether or not to send students to school today as Typhoon 18 continues on its path northward. In the meantime, parents and students are at home anxiously awaiting to hear their decision.
Do school officials collaborate with the Japan Meteorological Agency and decide to shutdown or postpone school? How does this process work?
Parents and their children are standing outside their homes this morning asking one another if they’ve heard the news about school. Is there school today? Is it postponed or is it cancelled? There seems to be quite a bit of confusion. Their kids are ready for school, umbrella in hand, yet parents are walking in circles, pacing back and forth in front of their houses because no one seems to know what school officials have decided.
Even though parents and students have paperwork given to them by their schools explaining the process, there seems to be a problem somewhere in the mix, otherwise there wouldn’t be so much confusion.
A part of the process involves watching for warnings and closings in the news on TV. When warnings and closings are present, it is obvious what to do. But what if your area or school is not listed when you turn on the TV?
Another part of the process involves a phone call from the school. The school calls the group leader’s home and announces the official decision. (Students gather in groups each morning and go to school. But when TV news takes down the warnings just before the time students normally leave their homes for school and the leader of the group has not been notified, worried parents and students begin to stress even more. Herein lies the problem.
There is too much lag time between taking down warnings and closings on TV and notifying group leaders what the school officials decision is.
Officials need to either cut out the TV warnings or they need to make sure the group leaders receive a phone call before the time students normally go to school to inform them one way or another, whether to stay put or go. If they cut out the TV process completely, TV news companies might not like it so much because having them in the loop means they get more viewers in the early morning, but without them in the process, one less middle man, information would get passed to the parents and students with less to worry about. Also, students would most likely get to school earlier because of less confusion.
At the time of this observation, there was no wind and only a trickle of rain. But by the time parents and students received word that school was open, the wind had picked up speed and the rain had begun falling. If students had left at the regular time, they could have gone to school in safer conditions and there would have been much less stress this morning! Who needs extra stress when a typhoon us pushing through?
