That's a relatively recent phenomenon. It used to be that weather actually had to happen before things got cancelled. More than a few times, we went to school with a big snow in the forecast only to be pulled out around noontime with the storm already in progress. I remember being in the classroom and we all cheered when we saw the yellow school buses pulling around the school at 10:30 or 11 in the morning as we knew that the principal was about to announce an early closure. The teacher would frown and assign us homework nonetheless.
This famously happened in the big February 1978 storm that shut down most of New England for days. We went to school that morning and were let out around noontime. By then, the gusts were approaching hurricane force and the wall of snow hit mid afternoon. There were thousands of cars stranded in the highways and it took the National Guard to get them out. All those poor people had to go to work that morning and their bosses kept them working until it was too late to get home safely.
This was still a culture where managers were judged on how well they kept their worker bees toiling at their desks and keeping them working through a storm was considered a feather in their cap. I experienced this for myself when I first got into management in the early 1990s. At the time, I managed a team of field technicians and as a snowstorm moved into the area, I told all my technicians to finish the call they were at and go home. All of them got home safely and I thought I did a good thing. Well I got seriously reamed out the next day by my regional manager. The only time in my career I was screamed at and had my job threatened.
