Monday, February 11, 2008

School is closed, no, open, no, closed ...

School closings.
Seems easy enough information to obtain, doesn't it?
It's NOT!
Finding out if your school is open seems like something you should be able to get from the local paper, right?
Well, we think so, too.
We usually have to call every district and ask "Have you closed school for tomorrow?"
Seems inefficient. We are trying to set up some sort of system so the schools will automatically inform us.
This is what happened early this morning: Bruce Bishop, our chief photographer and Web site guru, wanted to post school closings online. It was 2:50 a.m.
He looked first to WEOL, the AM radio station owned by the same company that owns The Chronicle. The radio's Web site had nothing. We found out later that the radio posts its school closings around 6 a.m. (That's what I get for having a night-owl instead of early-bird Web guy, I guess.)
When we had spoken to Lorain County Community College at about 11 p.m. Sunday night, the campus was going to remain open. But that decision changed in the morning.
Long story longer, we are doing our best to try to get you the most accurate information on school closings first. I wanted you to know that.
And if anybody has a suggestion on how we might do that more efficiently, I'd love to hear it.

2 comments:

Anonymous said...

http://www.cleveland.com/schoolclosings/#

Try piggybacking off of WKYC/Cleveland.com's listing if its all the same.

They seem to keep updated at regular intervals overnight as they are reported.

Don't know if the C-T is looking for any help these days with your online presence, but I'm looking for a change of pace.
terrance[at]thehenrys.ws - (yes Robin's younger bro! :-D)

Anonymous said...

Me again,

Sorry, here's a more direct link -
http://www.wkyc.com/weather/severe_weather/cancellations_closings/

Apologies. Hope this helps.
TH