[cka]

I can't speak for the op, but in Minnesota (in the northern part of the US), there are days in the winter when the temperature gets as low as -30F (~ -35C) with very high winds. This can make for very dangerous travel. Occasionally there are snow storms that make the roads impassable for part of the day.

On these sorts of days, the schools are sometimes closed to keep people off the roads.

[hermitdev]

I grew up in Montana, same latitude as MN. The entirety of my K-12 schooling was done there. We never once had our schools close for snow, but we did have 2 closures due to extreme cold. Once it was so cold, the school's boilers couldn't keep up heating the buildings. The other, the boilers were going so hard they actually managed to start a fire in the ceilings.

That said, there were days where snow prevented me from getting to school and days where the drive home was treacherous (the only way to tell where the road was the highway reflectors sticking out of the snow). I also learned how to chain up the first year I had my license. Nearly every day in December that year, I had to chain up to get home (water on ice and ~14% grade on the first hill up to the house).

[dboreham]

Also in Montata. Our school has closed for one day in 30 years due to weather. This was due to busses not being able to travel the town roads. Our kids would have been at school since they don't ride the bus. They've failed to get to school one day when my plow truck ended up stuck sideways across our road.

[wlesieutre]

> sometimes

Well that settles it, I'm not moving to Minnesota

[bluGill]

You have to be prepared for the normal. I have friend from MN who lived down south. It took them a long time to get used to the idea that everything shuts down from a cm of snow on the ground - something that would barely keep us at the speed limit (as opposed to the whatever over most people do...). While we do have practice in ice, I expect (without looking up) more people in MN go in the ditch when there is a cm of snow than people in southern states as a result of their paranoid.

In MN though (this applies to many other areas of the world that get a lot of snow/ice/cold) if we shut down that often we would get only have 1-2 weeks of travel between November and April and so it obviously isn't possible to play is safe. So we deal with it by having warm coats, boots, and other infrastructure.