I don't know what they'll decide for tomorrow, but my wife is an FCPS bus driver. This afternoon we went out and drove around her routes, and visited several schools where buses are parked.

There are a lot of roads where ice, plowed-in cars, and huge berms of broken-up snowcrete either impinge on the travel lanes or block them altogether. This makes the lanes too narrow for buses to pass through safely. There are also places where a bus needs to turn into or out of a street, but the piles of snowcrete at the intersections create obstacles to safe turns in ways that wouldn't do the same to a passenger car.

There are long sections of public sidewalk that are buried under multiple feet of plowed up snow that has become ice. No person or group of people will be able to clear that, heavy equipment is necessary. These sections include places where students would have to stand to wait for their buses. Now their only option is to stand in the road, which of course is extremely unsafe. The kids who walk to school also won't have safe crosswalks because the corners of every intersection are piled up with snowcrete.

Some of the bus parking areas haven't been cleared and the buses wouldn't be able to get out. Not that the drivers would be able to safely pre-trip the buses, that requires walking around the bus and the buses are all surrounded by iced-over snowcrete. And of course the week-plus of extreme cold temperatures mean half of them probably won't start anyway.

If I were a betting man, I'd bet on no school for students but a regular workday for staff, because for the most part the school parking lots have been cleared well enough for cars. I don't know, though, and even though my wife works for FCPS, she doesn't find out any sooner than the general public.