With records going back over 12 years, the SCASD prognostication team has been predicting weather-related school closures and delays.
Having over 2,000 Instagram followers as of Feb. 16, the team uses methods like a Magic 8 Ball and a snow day calculator, as well as conventional meteorology tools to make their predictions.
The SCASD Prognosticators became a team in 2010, led by State High teacher Eugene Ruocchio and retired teacher Frank Kowalczyk. The teachers’ classroom weather prediction game turned into a larger-scale competition as the team continued to grow.
Several of the first teachers to join have since retired, but the current team still has some of its original members.
John Donoughe, who teaches survivor science during school hours, is the current all-time leader with the most correct predictions. He was the team’s champion for the ‘23-’24 school year, with James Bleil being the most recent winner.
The team has a trophy for the member with the most correct predictions. The current owner is Bleil, but the trophy will be passed over to the next winner at the end of this school year.
Having been a prognosticator since before 2013, Donoughe says the school’s response to weather has changed over the years, making a slight shift towards canceling more often. Despite this, the team is still thriving.
“I think we’re more prone to make a conservative call, which is to say ‘let’s cancel’ or ‘let’s delay.’ We’re not prognosticating the weather- we’re prognosticating how the district will respond to weather reports,” Donoughe said. “Our accumulated knowledge is not so much linked to meteorology, it’s just years of observing how the district makes a call….It’s a fun way to develop some camaraderie within the science department.”
Both parents and students have shown interest in the prognosticators’ predictions, especially on their popular Instagram page. They have found that parents like to check the page before big weather events to get a sense of what the school’s decision might be before they make it. The page also tracks which prognosticators are correct with their predictions.
The team has been keeping records of their wins and losses for years, recently including two nonhuman players, an online snow day calculator and a Magic 8 Ball. Although the predictions are sometimes based on random chance, especially with weather events coming out of nowhere, the current leader, Jamie Wall, has not yet been beaten by either the ball or the calculator.
The humans on the team are currently doing much better than the calculator and the Magic 8 Ball, as they have been since they were introduced. The snow day calculator has 25% accuracy, while the Magic 8 Ball is in the lowest spot at 17%.
Wall is in the lead with 50% accuracy on her predictions (For reference, that’s 11% higher than Punxsutawney Phil’s prediction accuracy on Groundhog Day). She explained the team’s frequency of meeting and the factors that require a prediction.
“When we think there’s weather coming, we meet and make our predictions. They have to be done by 8:30 the day before the weather event. So if there’s a weather event on Monday, we have to make our predictions by 8:30 on Friday,” Wall said.
In late January, State College and the surrounding areas were hit with more than a foot of snow, which caused delays and cancellations across the school district. With the snowfall being the heaviest in years, the team met on the Friday morning before the storm hit to predict which days would have closures.
Sarah Lucas is another science teacher and team member who recounted the team’s decision on the snowstorm.
“I think we all said at least one day off, and then we actually predicted three days because some people thought the storm could impact school for up to three days, so we made three total calls. Everyone got the first day off right,” Lucas said.
The school ended up making a call to cancel school on that Monday, with the last two days of that week both being two-hour delays because of the low temperatures.
Visit this link to check out the prognosticators’ Instagram page.
