Last week’s cold weather had school division officials in Western Manitoba monitoring the temperature and wind chills in case they had to take action to shut down buses and classes.

In the end it didn’t get cold enough for any divisions to take action.

Tyler Shiels is the transportation coordinator with the Turtle Mountain School Division (TMSD) and he says they're ready to implement their policies if the weather dictates, they take action. “So, -45 is our thresh hold temperature including wind chill so if it’s -45 or lower then we cancel school and we generally cancel it by 6:30 in the morning.”

“We currently call things off the day of the storm but that’s not to say we won’t pivot from that if we do see that the temperature is going to be substantially colder than -45. It’s something we’ve done in the past, so we make look at that again.”

Shiels says they inform parents through their website, social media and local radio stations.

 

“We had a lot of cancellations last year and it was probably the most TMSD had seen in a number of years. Hopefully we aren’t going to see that many this winter. It was mostly due to road conditions last year and hopefully mother nature cooperates with us this winter.” said Tyler Shiles.