Worried, yes. This is just January, and already Rowan-Salisbury schools have been closed six days because of icy roads. Another winter storm is said to be on its way this weekend.

McCann would feel guiltier, probably, if he put busloads of children on the roads while they were still icy.

“We need to look very carefully at the safety conditions for each and every child, and I mean literally each and every child,” McCann said this morning. “I don’t think it’s appropriate to put a single child at risk.”

This is the price of having a large, centralized school system and a society that expects life to be risk-free. Roads in Salisbury and western Rowan may be perfectly clear. But if there’s a significant icy patch in eastern Rowan, all schools will remain closed.

McCann has a list of roads where travel still appears treacherous, primarily in eastern Rowan : St. Luke’s Church, Earnhardt, Legion Club, Moose, Gold Knob, Crescent, Lower and Upper Palmer, Dunn’s Mountain, and even some parts of the heavily traveled Bringle Ferry and Stokes Ferry roads.

Yet life has gone on for people who live on those roads. They’re going to work, to the store, to the mall. The only difference is that their school-aged children are home during the day, possibly unsupervised. Is that less dangerous than riding a 25,000-pound bus over a few icy patches?

McCann says he’s not just concerned about buses navigating the roads safely. He also worries about children waiting at bus stops and slipping on ice. They could fall into the path of a car. Or another vehicle could skid across some black ice and crash into a bus that was doing just fine on its own.

Rowan went through this debate in early 1996, when a blizzard shut down schools for 10 days. McCann stuck to his take-no-chances stance, and the school board changed the calendar to make up eight of the 10 days. At that time, state rules allowed the system to write off the other two days because of the extraordinary weather conditions.

The rules have changed since then, McCann says. Now the system must hold classes 180 days and have 1,000 hours of instruction —so every day must be made up and every make-up day must be a full day.

That’s as it should be. But here’s a three-pronged plea:

To Dr. McCann: Please don’t be hyper cautious about road conditions. Even on days without snow and ice, school buses face risks.

To the Department of Transportation: Please focus on the roads that are keeping schools closed.