Students were given the chance to sleep in on Jan. 21 after superintendent Clay Murphy made the call to cancel school. Murphy said he decided to cancel school after he went out at 4:20 a.m. to check the roads and discovered they were covered in black ice at the time. It was worse when he went back out at 5:30 a.m.

When he got to the high school parking lot, he put his brakes on and slid all the way across the parking lot because it was solid ice.

“It didn’t even look like anything was out there,” he said.

Mr. Murphy called the local news stations, radio stations, and sent out a School Messenger alert to parents about the cancellation. The main reason for the school cancellation was a concern for safety of the students, despite the fact that it didn’t look to be dangerous.

“I was surprised school got cancelled because when I woke up in the morning it didn’t look like anything was out there,” junior Emma Barkley said.

Schools in Kansas are given four to six and a half full snow days off depending on the year. Mr. Murphy said this is the first time in the Conway Springs school district that school has been cancelled because of black ice.

“I was excited when school got cancelled,” sophomore Amanda Smith said. “I stayed home and watched “iZombie” on Netflix.”