Cold Snap - KXNet - Bismarck/Minot/Williston/Dickinson

Cold Snap

With the thermometer reading 20 below or colder this morning, lots of machinery that spent the cold night outside just didn't want to work.

That was the case in Glenburn, where more than

half of the school's buses refused to start this morning.

And considering that about 240 of the school's 280 students arrive at school by bus every day, that's a big problem.

Still, with the pressure of needing to keep to the school calendar for the year, it was a tough call for school officials.

In the end, they decided to delay the start of school two hours and cancel all bus service.

Superintendent Brian Wolf said it's not a decision he takes lightly.

(Brian Wolf, Glenburn Superintendent) "You try to look at the safety of the kids and what's the best thing. On the other side of it parents, you have both parents working and they're counting on school as a place to have their kids for the day so it creates situations for parents when we don't have school trying to find daycare, so it's difficult either way that you make a call."

Wolf says with wind chills at 50 below and buses not operating reliably, it was too dangerous to have buses full of kids roaming around the countryside.