A thin stream of white powder flew out of the snowblower roaring along the sidewalk in front of Woodlawn School in North Lawrence.

But it wasn’t enough.

Damon Rogers, the school’s head custodian, knew he was going to have to face the inevitable – shoveling out the ice along a 200-yard stretch of concrete sidewalk.

“Normally, if it was just snow, we would have probably had it done by now,” he said. “Since it’s ice, you’ve got to keep chipping away at it.”

While thousands of Lawrence public school students, faculty and staff had the Martin Luther King Jr. holiday off, Rogers and his counterparts at Lawrence’s 22 school buildings were working overtime to battle the frozen layers of ice and snow.

Their goal: to get the sidewalks and parking lots clear so classes could resume on schedule today.

‘Labor intensive’

About 45 of the district’s maintenance employees and building custodians were chipping away at the icy glaze Monday, said Tom Bracciano, director of facilities and operations planning for Lawrence’s school district.

Because it was a holiday, they were getting overtime pay, or compensation time if they wanted that instead.

“We have overtime built into the budget for custodial maintenance,” Bracciano said.

The district did run low on its supply of sand and salt at the district’s shop and at the two high schools. More was purchased Monday, he said.

“We’re still probably OK on the budget,” he said.

Damon Rogers, head custodian at Woodlawn School, prepares to remove snow and ice from the school's sidewalks in preparation for school today. Schools were out Monday for the Martin Luther King Jr. holiday, which gave schools a chance to dig out from this weekend's winter storm. Rogers was working Monday morning at the North Lawrence elementary school.

The main problem was allocating staff and equipment to get all the work done quickly. “When you’ve got 22 buildings to go to, it takes some time,” he said. “Our big thing is the amount of sidewalks we have. It’s huge.”

Some schools, like Quail Run School, have walkways around the building that need to be cleared – much of it by shoveling.

“It’s very labor intensive on the sidewalks,” Bracciano said. Maintenance workers had put down salt and sand during the weekend on the parking lots, which has helped in the cleanup.

“Some spots, it’s popping up when you drop that blade. Others, it’s just going right over the top,” he said.

He said a sand spreader and a snowplow broke down Monday at Free State High School, but a mechanic came out to make repairs.

Out of snow days

The district used all of its official snow days Nov. 30 and Dec. 1 during a similar storm.

The district will need to add an extra day, or extra hours in a day, to this year’s school calendar if more snow days occur.

“The snow days, in my mind, aren’t an issue,” Bracciano said. “We’ll get done what we can. We don’t like to cancel school.”

Unsafe sidewalks are the biggest concern, he said.

“We will cancel school if there is a safety issue,” he said.