Late last night, the superintendent of Portland Public Schools - and presumably other members of the team - made the decision to close all schools and offices today due to a winter storm warning that is in effect. This decision came at a time when, especially for those of us East of the river, there was no snow on the ground at all. For me, this means a welcome day off because I work in a school and have no children, but to many others this means potential hardship, as parents who do not have the day off from work look for a way to care for their children.

​It seems every time there is a weather closure in Portland our decision makers get heavily criticized by people outside of our area and community. People from cities that get "real" snow will look at Portland and say, "they closed schools for an inch of snow? What a bunch of panicking babies!" or something to that effect. But I would ask for a little bit of patience and understanding of the particular circumstances that Portland faces. See, we don't really close our schools because of snow; we close them because of ice.

Now, in most cities where it snows regularly snowfall happens in a normal and predictable pattern. It drops to well below freezing, say 20 degrees Fahrenheit (a good -6 or -7 celsius, for those of you in the rest of the world), big, fluffy snowflakes fall and form nice drifted banks that are a pleasure to behold. If just a few inches fall, they plow it out of the way in the early morning so people can get to school and work, maybe they plow it again in the afternoon so people can get home. It's safe to walk on, and most people know how to drive in it.

​But that's not what happens in Portland. Generally In Portland the temperature never drops convincingly below the freezing point. During the night It will drop to about 30 Fahrenheit (only about -1 celsius) or maybe as low as 28. Then it will snow a little bit, and about an inch or two will stick because the ground has managed to cool enough for that, and in the morning it will look, ever so briefly, like a beautiful winter wonderland!

​But very quickly things start to turn. around midday, the temperature might creep up to 33 or 34, just above the freezing point, and the snow will begin to melt, ever so slightly. But it certainly won't melt all the way, and as the sun sets and the temperature drops down again, all that melted water on top of and inside of the snow will freeze into solid ice. Now instead of that nice, powdery packed snow, we have essentially a layer cake of ice that is very dangerous to walk on or drive on. I mean, I've walked on actual snow, and I've gone snowshoeing in the mountains; it's not so bad. Portland ice is impossible to traverse safely. It's also very difficult to see and appropriately gauge, especially on the roads, and drivers who don't respect the dangers of winter storms in Portland very often hit patches of black ice that cause numerous accidents.

To make maters worse, if we do manage to clear the roads with snow plows and the like, or perhaps all the snow manages to melt during the day, we run into another fun little surprise that the Willamette River Valley has in store for us: a weather phenomenon called "freezing rain". Freezing rain, in fact, is what we're really worried about today, not snow.

 Freezing rain occurs when the temperature at ground level is below freezing, but warm currents several hundred feet up make the air too warm to form actual snowflakes, so what falls instead is liquid rain. As the rain hits the frozen ground, it freezes, forming incredibly treacherous layers of transparent ice, especially on paved surfaces. I've spoken with people from other parts of the country who criticize Portland's weather closure decisions, and when I mention freezing rain many of them haven't even heard of it, let alone understand the dangers it presents.

​So I pose to you, dear reader, the following scenario: you are the superintendent of Portland Public Schools. You have been charged by the people of the city with the solemn task of educating, caring for, and providing for the safety of the district's roughly 49,000 children, and you're being asked to make a call. There's no snow on the ground yet in most of your district, but there definitely is snow in the outer parts of the district (another key thing to remember is that Portland is in a valley, and that means we're surrounded by hills that get hit harder by storms), and meteorologists advising you are 90% sure that while there will not be snow on the ground at the start out the school day, by the middle of the school day we will see a fairly serious ice storm that could strand kids at school and cause a lot of problems and put a lot of people at risk. The decision not to close schools has caused this to happen in the past, and in fact just last year the district decided not to close schools and a winter storm did blow in and strand  children at school and caused accidents, etc. etc.

So you're 90% sure - or heck, let's say just 80% sure - that this will happen. Do you close the schools? Well, the superintendent said yes today, and I'm not about to say that decision was wrong. You're welcome to come to your own conclusions, but please consider the whole situation.

Best wishes,
​Sillius Buns

It happened.

Yesterday, I received a phone call from work informing me that I would no longer be picking up one of the kids on my van route, and that our other driver would be taking her instead. Her mother had called in and informed my boss that she wasn't comfortable having her daughter picked up by a man.

I can't say I'm surprised. In fact, if anything about the situation surprises me it's that it's taken eight weeks since the start of the school year for someone to make a call like that.

This incident (the first of many, I fear) really helps explain why I was a bit apprehensive about accepting the shift in my work responsibilities. I work at a small nonprofit arts school, and in September I was asked to switch from doing mainly front desk and office work to running our after-school childcare program. It sounds like something that would be right up my alley, right? I love kids, I'm great with kids, kids love me and look up to me, and I have the skill set necessary to provide high-quality care to children and have been doing so most of my life. But I knew, in the back of my mind, that I was born with a penis, and people just don't want people with penises watching their children.

Now you may say that it's nothing personal - that people want to look out for their children, and in that regard it's often much safer to assume the worst than assume the best - and certainly I shouldn't take it personally. But I've seen friends' careers get destroyed by mere rumors and discomfort, and it is more than reasonable to fear the same. Plus, when you have impostor's anxiety, a little call like that can really worry you.

To be fair, a disproportionate percentage of employee-involved daycare facility child abuse cases (whew, say that ten times fast) involve a male employee. But I'd be willing to put down a pretty substantial bet at fairly good odds that if you pulled a random case file out of a list of all reported child abuse cases, the perpetrator would not be a daycare worker. It would be a family member.

Hell, even back in the mid-80s during the male childcare worker witch hunt that spread through the country - back before background checks, and trainings, and bathroom improvements, and mandatory reporting, and all that good preventative stuff - nationwide studies still showed it was much more likely that a family member would abuse a child than a daycare worker. Believe it or not, a third of abuse incidents that took place in daycare settings were also perpetrated by a family member, not an employee.

Oh, and another thing that studies show, is that while abusers are disproportionately male, the proportion isn't that skewed, and your child could still absolutely be abused by a female employee. It might even be easier, seeing as how female employees - and even women who want to enter the field - are treated with less scrutiny.

Bottom line is you have to trust someone. I'm a well-vetted professional who has passed thorough background checks. I would trust me long before uncle so and so.

Yesterday I turned in my last paper as an undergraduate student. It was an 8-pager on the tensions between individual and communal readings of identity in Nitozake Shange's For Colored Girls who have Considered Suicide / When the Rainbow is Enuf and ZZ Packer's Drinking Coffee Elsewhere. I just barely managed to squeak it in under the length limit, and I turned it in to the amazingly brilliant and talented professor Bahareh Lampert.

The paper's fine and I'm not too worried about talking about it today. Were there things wrong with it? Sure. I don't think that any piece of writing is ever "done". Hopefully you get to a point where you decide it's publishable and you convince yourself you're finished, but I think that even the greatest works of literature the world has ever seen could stand another revision or two ;) Suffice it to say I am fairly proud of it and I have done my very best to overcome a lot of the common errors that have plagued my writing since high school, and this paper definitely looks better than the stuff i wrote five years ago, so I would say that I have learned something at least.

Turning that paper in drove the point home more than I thought it would, though. This is it. This is the end of my time as an undergrad. After this, or rather after my final exams next week, I will be able to walk and receive my diploma. I will be educated. I have tried not to think of my education in the same way people tend to think about birthdays, that they are one age for 364 days and then on the 365th they suddenly become one year older, but at least for a moment yesterday education wasn't an incremental, lifelong process that I was simply directly facilitating by going to a university. It was something specific, something measurable, that I have put 20 years of my life into (counting preschool) and that will soon be completed. And when it's over, I'm going to take a brief break, and continue on into the "real world". It's all very exciting!