Jan. 18—A chicken tender can’t take up for itself — but Monongalia County Schools can.

Should any freezer unit in any kitchen of any school in the district begin an unplanned thaw, be it by power failure or compressor issue, nutrition director Brian Kiehl’s smartphone will immediately chirp with texts and emails of warning.

“We have a lot of high-tech systems like that in place now, ” the district’s deputy superintendent Donna Talerico said Thursday.

“Most of it came from the bomb cyclone.”

She’s referring to the unprecedented storm in late December 2022 that brought a vortex of potentially lethal, Arctic-type winds with it, causing temperatures across the region to plummet as much as 30 degrees in 30 minutes.

More than half of Mon’s school buildings were damaged in the icy onslaught, with leaking roofs and flooding from burst pipes being the common factor.

That included those aforementioned kitchen freezers and the food therein that had to be tossed.

In the meantime, Mon students went back to school Thursday after a mini-break of sorts, surprisingly planned by Mother Nature.

Students were off for Monday’s Martin Luther King Jr. federal holiday, and when the cold clamped down Tuesday and Wednesday — with the measure of snow and iced-up roads that came with it — the district called school for those days as well.

“I was thinking about the roads, ” Superintendent Eddie Campbell Jr. said, “but mainly I was thinking of kids at the bus stop with those wind chills. Especially the elementary school kids.”

Wind chills, he knows.

Before returning to his native West Virginia, he once served a stint as principal of a high school just before the Arctic Circle in Alaska, where, on one memorable evening, the mercury settled to 60 below.

“That’s beyond cold, ” he said.

By the hit-or-miss whims of West Virginia weather, Mon’s students reported to class Thursday in 20-degree temperatures.

Buildings, the superintendent said, emerged generally unscathed, although some roads in the rural reaches were still unpassable to buses, causing the cancellation of several routes in the attendance areas of Morgantown and University high schools.

Buses serving three routes for Clay-Battelle Middle /High School in Blacksville on the western end of the county were grounded too, for the morning.

“We’re pretty much used to that out here in the winter, ” Clay-Battelle Principal David Cottrell said.

“We just adapt and plug along, ” he said.

While waiting for the next storm to move in, he said.

That’s the cause of a looming pattern that could bring another round of measurable snowfall to the region.

Totals from 3-5 inches of snow are expected from the weather maker, forecasters say, with the flakes set to start falling at 1 a.m. Friday.

North-central West Virginia, including Mon County, is under a winter weather advisory through 10 a.m. Saturday.

“We’re already telling our kids to make sure they have their Chromebooks with them tonight, ” Cottrell said, referring to the portable laptop computers issued to all county students in grades 3-12.

Traditional packs with textbooks and lessons on paper have also been assembled for those C-B students who might have spotty Wi-Fi or no Internet access at all.

“We learned that from COVID, ” the principal said.