Schools face toll from snow days

With a light sprinkling of snow here and there throughout the winter, snow-days didn't seem like something to worry about this year in Whitman County. January stayed close to average both for temperature and precipitation.

Then February hit. While far from the coldest on record, this past February, according to the National Climatic Data Center, with its monthly average temperature of 24.6 degrees, was more than 10 degrees colder than average. It was almost 10 degrees colder than January. Add to all that cold the month's precipitation being almost twice of what is normal and it is not really a...