In 1984, I went to the University of Maryland at College Park and I wasn’t doing many of the activities other college kids were doing. So I went to look for a campus job and applied as a driver at the transit system that runs the buses. It turned out to be a wonderful job and I really loved it, later becoming a dispatcher and then a manager.
I [graduated] in 1988 with a degree in economics, but also with transportation experience. I decided I needed a real job [when] my wife and I were [ready] to start having children, so I applied for a job in Montgomery County as a depot manager [for the county public schools]. I started on July 1, 1996, and I became the transportation director in 2009. I oversee 2,200 employees, the maintenance of all vehicles and the training [of drivers], routing, and purchasing of buses.
The day before a snowstorm is coming, we’re worried. Many of them come overnight, but sometimes they come during the school day, which impacts us in different ways.
We have 10 folks on our snow team. When the snowstorm happens overnight, six of them are up at 3 a.m., driving around different parts of the county, checking what roadway conditions are like, what the school sites are like, what condition the sidewalks are
in, those kinds of things.
We talk with the surrounding counties because we want to make sure. Everybody else closes and we go to school…nobody wants to do that.
When we finally decide [what to recommend], it goes to my boss, the district’s chief operating officer, at 4:15 a.m., and he may ask for more data [before informing] the superintendent of schools by 4:30 a.m. We try to have a final decision by 4:45, [leaving] time to alert all the media so it’s actually on the air by 5.
There are times when you think [a storm] is coming and it doesn’t arrive. Then people are really wound up—‘I could have gone to work, and now my kids are home and it’s nice and sunny out.’ Nobody wants to be in that situation. We try to wait so we can have the most up-to-date information when we make the decision.
[When] President Obama had just been inaugurated, we closed schools on a day that they wouldn’t have thought about closing in Chicago. I remember [Obama] saying, ‘I woke up and I was shocked to find out my daughter didn’t go to school because Montgomery County, Md., closed their schools.’ He’s on national TV poking fun at us.
We have this snow wimp thing going on. I don’t think we’re well prepared as a community to say, ‘This is a tough day, but we’re going to deal with it.’
There are snowfalls now where we close schools that, 15 years ago, we absolutely would have [kept them open]. We know that things can function, but the public outcry, if you try to go on one of those days, is just crazy. So there’s no question that public opinion has caused us to close and delay more than we have in the past.
You’re never going to be completely accurate on this. It just ends up that you either made a good decision based on not having all the information or you screwed up the decision—but never because you didn’t care about kids or safety or employees.
