MORGANTOWN — Snow is a relative thing, Eddie Campbell Jr. said Friday — and he’s got the resume to back that up.
But that’s getting ahead of the narrative.
Just like the windshield wipers on a four-wheeler, the first serious snowfall of season began its swoop through the region last evening.
Gray skies and black-and-white predictions from the meteorologists prompted Campbell, who is Monongalia County’s superintendent of schools, to call for an early dismissal of classes Thursday afternoon in order to get ahead of the weather pattern.
It worked.
By early evening Thursday, when the snowfall was averaging about an inch an hour, Campbell went ahead and called school Friday as well.
“That’s when it started getting obvious that the forecasters were right on this one,” he said.
“I was thinking about all our outlying areas,” the superintendent said, in relation to the half-foot of snow, give or take a notch on the ruler, that landed on Mon at the height of the storm.
“I didn’t want to see any buses, with any kids, stranded somewhere,” he said. “Monongalia County has a lot of geography.”
Geography, as in the higher climes of eastern Mon, he said, to go with the rural reaches of the western end.
Campbell wasn’t the only school official to make the call across the Mountain State, as 48 other superintendents did the same.
The storm, which had dropped as much of a foot of snow in locales across the Northeast and mid-Atlantic, did its work.
Hancock was the only county in West Virginia to operate under a two-hour delay, and five other counties — Brooke, Fayette, Morgan, Ritchie and Wetzel — switched over to remote learning for the day.
Campbell said the decision in Mon was made to not go remote, because of treacherous roads.
Teachers would still have had to report to their classrooms to deliver the lessons electronically, he said.
Remote-learning, Campbell said, is something he’d rather resort to in times of extreme cold, such as a 10-below wind-chill or similar circumstance.
“That’s when it might be safe for our teachers to drive to school,” he said, “but unsafe for our kids waiting at the bus stop.”
Wind-chills won’t be an issue this weekend. Highs will bounce up to 40s today and Sunday, AccuWeather said.
It is winter, though, the forecaster said.
Monday could clock in at 30, with another chance of snow that evening.
Meanwhile, Campbell knows snow.
Before his arrival in Mon County, he was a principal at a high school just below the Arctic Circle in Alaska.
Upon returning to his native West Virginia, he did seven years as school superintendent in mountainous Tucker County — where such accumulation always has its own seat at the table.
Don’t call him a weather snob, though, he said.
“With snow in Alaska and Tucker County, there’s more of it and it stays around longer. But other than that cold is cold and snow is snow. All relative.”
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