WATERLOO - Short nights and fretful days are the norm this winter for school superintendents in Iowa.

Frequent storms have led to most districts cancelling school five to ten times or more and having at least as many early dismissals and late starts.

For school leaders, winter weather means late nights and early mornings spent watching the weather, calling sources and driving suspect roads in an attempt to make the right call.

Neil Mullen, superintendent for Union Community Schools, has spent more time than he would like on 4 a.m. drives through the countryside examining road conditions between La Porte City and Dysart.

"It's been a tough go this winter," Mullen said.

He has three weather services bookmarked on his computer. He talks with district transportation directors in Dysart and La Porte City as well as superintendents in neighboring districts.

"It's time consuming, but we do the best we can," Mullen said.

Even after that research, a cancellation can leave some in the district scratching their heads.

The Union district covers 256 square miles, and weather conditions at one end of the district can vary greatly from the other end.

"Many times people in town just aren't aware of what's going on in the country," Mullen said.

Students in Waterloo or Cedar Falls can be pretty sure a cancellation in one district means no school in the other. There is a reason for that.

Waterloo Superintendent Dewitt Jones usually talks with Cedar Falls Superintendent David Stoakes early in the morning.

The Waterloo school district subscribes to Weather Central, which monitors the weather and calls district officials day or night with alerts. If the weather is getting dicey, transportation director Marty Metcalf and Jones get on the phone with each other. They call county and city street crews and police and drive bus routes to see how the roads look.

Over in Cedar Falls, Stoakes consults with the transportation director, watches weather coverage on television and pays attention to the National Weather Service.

But a healthy dose of art balances the science when it comes to cancellations.

"You're always going to make some mistakes because you're basing decisions based on forecasts. You just don't take any chances," Stoakes said.

Storms are unpredictable. A huge system may be streaming across southwest Iowa, but its course through the Cedar Valley is uncertain.

"I've been a superintendent 18 years, and of those years this has been the most difficult, there's a lot of tweeners," Jones said.

It can be an agonizing decision. Regardless of the choice, the district will hear from parents upset about dealing with children unexpectedly home from school or concerned about children being out in dangerous conditions.

"They're always going to leave someone mad at them whether they cancel or don't cancel," said Alan Czarnetzki, University of Northern Iowa associate professor of meteorology.

The stress involved can sneak up on superintendents, who often hadn't considered the difficulty of such decisions when they entered their career path.

"My wife will tell you that I agonize over this, I really do," said Jere Vyverberg, superintendent for the Waverly-Shell Rock School District. "If I'm going to make a mistake, I want to make it on the side of safety."

That is a common theme for superintendents.

"I remember an old saying another superintendent told me: 'I'd rather go to school in June than a funeral in February,' " Jones said.

Czarnetzki, director of the University of Northern Iowa's STORM project, has helps train superintendents and others to find good weather information.

He found superintendents used conversations with their peers as a primary source of information. In his training, Czarnetzki tried to emphasize that superintendents share the source of their information so they know what they were comparing.

Czarnetzki focuses on training superintendents to make sure the information they receive applies to their specific location.

"We weren't trying to teach superintendents to be weather forecasters," he said.

Contact Jon Ericson at (319) 291-1461 or jonathan.ericson@wcfcourier.com.