Are Massachusetts Schools Literally Melting?

No, but the heat has made floors too wet for some Western Massachusetts districts.

Are Massachusetts schools literally melting? Short answer: Sort of!

You know those days back in high school when your superintendent refused to cancel school during a blizzard, forcing you to fish-tail your way down Main Street in your white 1990 Mercury Sable with questionable brakes at 6 a.m. so you could potentially make it to class before the snowdrifts got really deep? (Just a for instance…) And then you saw on the news that it sleeted for forty seconds in Washington D.C. and thus the kids there had school off for a month because they were totally unequipped to handle it and you shook your fist in the air and cursed the dumb D.C. people?

Yeah, this story is the opposite of that.

At least two western Massachusetts schools have had to send students home because the heat and humidity are making the floors too slippery for kids to safely navigate the hallways. At Amherst Regional High School, floors were recently waxed, Principal Mark Jackson told the Associated Press, and when temperatures reached into the 90s on Wednesday, those floors began to melt. Twenty-two people fell before the school district decided to cancel classes Thursday. The Mount Greylock Regional School District also cancelled classes because the building isn’t insulated and the rains and humidity made the floors unsafe.

The issue has prompted Mount Greylock’s community to realize their buildings might be a bit subpar and discuss how they might update them. Beyond that, let us just say that somewhere in the D.C. region, they are pointing and laughing at our school systems’ inability to handle temperatures under 100 degrees. Karma comes back around.