When should the weather predictions merit school closure? Good guidance happens when climate observations and calculations come together.
A winter weather cancellation tool is born! The Winter Weather Cancellation Calculator assists emergency managers, school administrators and safety officers in quantifying the risk posed by incoming winter weather systems. This calculator lets the user enter the expected weather conditions, based on the guidance of NIU-Winter Weather Model for School Closures (https://www.niu.edu/emergencyinfo/weather/_pdf/NIU-Severe-Weather-Evaluation-tool.pdf) to provide meaningful closure advice.
Dr. Jeffrey Rice, director of cybersecurity and computer science and a professor at Olivet Nazarene University, enjoys “geeky” projects much more than the average person. So for a fun project one weekend in January 2026, he used vCalc.com and a model from Northern Illinois University (NIU) to create this new calculator.
“The Winter Weather Cancellation Calculator takes an objective approach to the decision for cancelling school and other group activities,” Dr. Rice says. “The calculation ranks weather and weather conditions on a scale from 0 to 100, then gives a recommendation regarding cancellation. It takes the emotion out of the decision.”
The calculator is based on a scientific approach developed by researchers at NIU. It enables users to simply enter a few values (temperature, wind speed, snow and/or ice) and immediately get information as to whether closure should be considered.
Now, Dr. Rice’s calculator is part of an online repository of academic calculators, data and information pages to empower students, educators, researchers and professionals. This repository is a partnership between Olivet and vCalc.
A Productive Connection
Olivet’s online calculator repository can be found at https://www.vcalc.com/pbv/olivetnaz
This repository, hosted by vCalc, is a free public system with more than 4,000 pages of calculators and content — making it a major addition to Olivet’s digital ecosystem.
- Faculty can use calculators to supplement instruction, publish content, or even provide math-enabled textbooks with embedded calculators in every chapter to help their students with the right math tools at the right place.
- Students can explore concepts easily, utilize trusted tools, and even publish their own content and make their own tools to deepen their learning experience.
- The general public — including other academic entities, corporations and professionals — have access to this resource.
- And, of course, this repository appears in a plethora of Google searches!
“vCalc’s partnership with Olivet helps provide some simple tools that eliminate the need for the user to understand the calculations,” says Dr. Dale Hathaway, associate dean of Olivet’s Martin D. Walker School of Science, Technology, Engineering and Mathematics. “I’m sure that Dr. Rice’s Winter Weather Cancellation Calculator will become an extremely useful and simple option for schools, both private and public, to objectively identify when a school closure is warranted.”
Extending into the Future
vCalc’s platform provides a powerful and time-tested system to build and maintain suites of calculators and data items. Its master library has over 15,000 expert-developed online calculators that perform more than 1 million monthly calculations — at no charge to the users.
This proven capability and reliability opened the door to a deeper partnership between Olivet and vCalc in the form of the customized site on the vCalc platform. This accessibility will continue to benefit students, faculty, staff, families and the public in the area of life-applicable, real world mathematic calculations.
“As technical challenges become more interdisciplinary, Olivet’s calculator suite will continue to grow,” says Kurt Heckman, co-creator of vCalc. “Whether used to calculate fluid dynamics in a lab, build educational models for coursework, or design marketing tools for industry outreach, Olivet’s calculator suite delivers a low-barrier, high-impact solution that helps us broaden our reach and relevance.”
Learn more about Olivet’s Walker School of STEM at https://www.olivet.edu/academics/colleges/walker-school-of-stem/ or by contacting the Office of Admissions at admissions@olivet.edu or 800-648-1463.
