Suppose that an ice storm is dumping a wintery mix and school is in session. It will take 10 minutes to scrape the ice from your windshield. The back roads are coated with black ice. Kids slip when they walk on the sidewalk. In other words, it's bad outside. Should school officials cancel classes and send students home or should they keep kids in school and wait until the it's safe to drive? I can't remember school officials ever choosing to wait, yet the expected value of that choice clearly outweights sending students home at the height of the storm.
Clearly, waiting for the salt trucks and plows to secure the road is the optimal strategy. Yet, students are released early exacerbating the externality. The social cost is even higher than the danger of releasing 5,000 children in Muscatine. Parents will take time off of work to get home and pick up children from sitters or babysit. This is the class negative externality case in my opinion. Everyone is acting without thinking about the cost they are imposing on others so the marginal social cost is higher than the marginal private cost. The optimal equilibrium is lower. Clearly, school officials should consider all of these costs and keep students in school.
I don't have to make the decision to release students early. Maybe the community response to my decision would make me unpopular or the threat of a lawsuit makes it an easier strategy. But if the safety of our students is the number one priority, then keeping students in school while a storm is raging is in line with our priorities regardless of the backwash.
Hey Flad, I thought you were willing to bet that we wouldn't have school early out? I should've accepted. Remember 1st per.?
ReplyDeleteyou win....
ReplyDeleteSuppose the storm is really bad at 11 am and instead of dismissing early, the officials decide to keep the students in school until the storm dies down per your suggestion. What then happens if the storm goes on for several more hours, perhaps into late evening? Does the school really want to be responsible for the students during that long of a duration? And if they don't want to hold them past regular school hours then perhaps it would be better to release them early when its bad, at say noon, then when it gets worse at 3. Storms are hard to predict and I think the intent of an early dismissal is the anticipation that the storm will grow and that it would be better to get them out early, even if it is bad, then at 3 pm when they would be letting them out anyway and in even worse weather.
ReplyDeletesuch decisions are indeed hard to make...i suggest making an expected value equation that weighs the probability how long the storm will last and make the decision based on that...instead, they become a release school early taker and look what other schools are doing...this is hardly rational....
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