We added school closings to monroenews.com this year, giving students, parents and teachers another option on snowy winter mornings.

Each school district in the county was given access to our Web site to update their own story - a place where they could communicate with their constitutents, adding as much information as necessary.

I waited patiently through one of the warmest Decembers on record, then through most of January, before winter weather finally arrived. Until we had some experience with the system, we weren’t sure how effectively it would work.

Now, after a couple weeks of winter, it’s clear that it works, but not as effectively as we had hoped.

Some school districts have used the new system, carefully keeping it updated. Others haven’t. We’ve tried to make sure it was updated for all the schools, whether they participated or not. It’s been a challenge.

But it must be working well enough for some county residents. We’ve had more than 10,000 page views on our school closing page so far in February. There were more than 3,000 each on two days, Feb. 5 and Feb. 13.

The first big school closing day, Feb. 5, was the rockiest. Most students had already gone back to bed before we had all the schools updated. But since, all the school closings have been posted by 5:45 a.m. or so - and many before that.

We’re already making plans for a better, more user-friendly process for next year.

This entry was posted on Friday, February 16th, 2007 at 1:44 pm and is filed under Local issues, events, The Evening News. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.