Snow day policies of major school boards

This guide is a map of board pages we have checked, not a digest of every snow-day policy in Canada. A policy we have not read on the board's own site is not here. Announcement times are not here. Several organizations describe a target window on their sites, and those sentences change. Our board pages tell you to read the current page in the morning rather than trust a clock we copied.

The boards below are the ones with pages on CanadaSnowDay. Calgary, Edmonton, and Montreal are included because families search for them. We link the board homepages we have already used on those city pages. We do not invent a Calgary or Montreal closure procedure.

Toronto: two boards, one bus office

The Toronto District School Board runs English public schools in the City of Toronto. The Toronto Catholic District School Board runs English Catholic schools there. They are separate employers and separate closure decisions. A TDSB closure is evidence about the weather. It is not a TCDSB decision. Both statements are on our TDSB and TCDSB pages, and both point at the boards' own sites.

For students on a yellow bus, both boards' transportation pages direct families to the Toronto Student Transportation Group. TSTG describes itself as an initiative of the two boards. We do not republish fleet statistics. Many secondary students use the TTC. A school-bus notice is not a transit shutdown.

The Toronto city page is the forecast. The board pages are the links. The predictor's board menu does not change the percentage. It only opens the board page.

Peel: one consortium, a geographic limit

The Peel District School Board and the Dufferin-Peel Catholic District School Board are the boards named with Student Transportation of Peel Region. Our Peel page records STOPR's own limit: students residing in Peel Region. Our Dufferin-Peel page says Dufferin-Peel schools also exist in Dufferin, and families there should confirm transportation on the board site rather than assume the Peel consortium covers the county.

Mississauga and Brampton are the city pages tied to those boards. The forecast point is the city. It is not a guarantee that every address in the board's area sees the same road.

Ottawa, London, Barrie, Waterloo, Hamilton, Guelph

Each of these boards has a page because we opened the board site and the transportation site it names.

• Ottawa-Carleton DSB and Ottawa Student Transportation Authority. City page: Ottawa. Our OCDSB page says the forecast uses Ottawa's profile, including high cold sensitivity. That cold setting is a property of the city in our model, not a formula the board published.
• Thames Valley DSB and mybigyellowbus.ca. City page: London. Our board page does not split the region into a separate Oxford or Elgin score.
• Simcoe County DSB and Simcoe County Student Transportation Consortium. City page: Barrie.
• Waterloo Region DSB and Student Transportation Services of Waterloo Region. City pages: Kitchener and Waterloo.
• Hamilton-Wentworth DSB and Hamilton-Wentworth Student Transportation Services. City page: Hamilton. The board page mentions the escarpment as a reason to try the rural setting and to read the freezing-rain line. It does not publish a separate Mountain score.
• Upper Grand DSB and Wellington-Dufferin Student Transportation Services. City page: Guelph.

Halton DSB and York Region DSB have board pages and transportation links (haltonbus.ca, schoolbuscity.com). They do not yet have city pages for every municipality they serve. We did not add Oakville, Burlington, Markham, or Vaughan as separate forecast pages, because the ERA5 snowfall and January mean at those points were too close to Toronto's to justify another article. Use the board page and search the postal code. That is a deliberate omission, explained in How much snow closes schools in Canada.

Calgary, Edmonton, and Montreal

These cities have forecast pages. They do not have board pages on this site, because we have not written a checked snow-day procedure for them.

The Calgary page links the Calgary Board of Education. The Catholic board is separate and is not linked there. The page says so. We do not state a CBE centimetre rule or a posting time.

The Edmonton page links Edmonton Public Schools. That is a homepage, not a snow-day policy we have paraphrased.

The Montreal page links the Centre de services scolaire de Montréal and the English Montreal School Board. We do not claim those two authorities always make the same call. They are different organizations. Read the site that matches the school.

Halton and York, without fake city pages

Halton District School Board transportation is the site our HDSB page links, haltonbus.ca. York Region District School Board transportation is the site our YRDSB page links, schoolbuscity.com. Both boards have pages here. Oakville, Burlington, Milton, Markham, Vaughan, and Richmond Hill do not. Their ERA5 snowfall and January means landed too close to Toronto's 92 cm and −3.8°C January to carry a separate article. Publishing them would have repeated Toronto's winter with a new title. Search the postal code on the home page, then open the board page for the official notice. The postal code uses the GeoNames forward-sortation table described on the methodology page (GeoNames, CC BY 4.0). It does not assign you to Halton or York by itself. The board finder does that (ontario.ca).

What every board page on this site refuses to do

Each board page estimates the weather at a primary place and links the official sites. It does not copy a fleet count. It does not promise an announcement hour. It does not say that the Catholic board and the public board must match, except where a page is specifically about one board. The Toronto pages say the opposite: the boards are separate. It does not treat a bus cancellation as a school closure. The factor lines and the two scores exist so that refusal is visible, not only written in a guide.

If a sentence here is narrower than a memory of a snow day, that narrowness is intentional. Memory is not a source. The source is the page we linked, as checked for this site, plus the methodology for anything that is our formula rather than their policy.

How to use this list

Find the board that matches the school, not the nearest city name. Ontario's finder is the public tool for that (ontario.ca). Open the board homepage and the transportation homepage on the morning of. Ignore any clock time you remember from a previous winter unless you see it on their site that day.

The percentage on our board page is the weather at the board's primary place, using the model on the methodology page. Picking the board in the predictor does not change the math. If the title says "School is probably on" or "A snow day is likely", that phrase is the same verdict as the gauge. It is not a motion the board has passed.

Corrections go through the contact page. A correction is a dead link or a sentence that no longer matches the official page. Send the URL. We check it before we change the sentence. A message that only names a city, without the board site, is not enough to add a policy we have not read.