Heather Philp, transportation director for Anchorage School District, approached a sharp curve on DeArmoun Road during an early morning drive to evaluate road conditions on Friday, Dec. 5, 2025. (Marc Lester / ADN)
Just after 3 a.m. Friday, Heather Philp descended DeArmoun Road on the Anchorage Hillside, right before a treacherous turn known as “Dead Man’s Curve.” She slammed on the brakes, and her vehicle slid for about 10 seconds before coming to a stop. Philp was pleased with the results of her test.
“The stopping’s good,” Philp said. “It’s 28 degrees right now, which is below freezing, which is a comfortable space. It’s light snow so no rain, the roads have great grip.”
Philp, a former Anchorage school bus driver, now leads the Anchorage School District’s transportation team. She and about a dozen other employees set out at 2:30 a.m. Friday to monitor road conditions and gather information. They later shared that information with school administrators, who make the ultimate call on whether roads and sidewalks are safe enough for school buses and students who walk to school.
They did similar checks almost every day this week, after rising temperatures and freezing rain coated the roads with ice. Information on conditions gathered by Philp’s team helped guide the decision to close Anchorage schools twice this week, but students wanting another day off weren’t quite so lucky on Friday.
“I’m sure they’ll be bummed. Every kid loves a snow day,” Philp said.
Heather Philp, transportation director for Anchorage School District, drives roads on the Anchorage Hillside to evaluate driving conditions. (Marc Lester / ADN) The intersection at O’Malley Road and Old Seward Highway shows snow and ice. (Marc Lester / ADN)
According to district spokesperson Corey Allen Young, this week’s two school closures due to inclement weather days are the extent of what district officials built into the school calendar this year. That means if weather closes schools for another day this year, students will have make up for the day later.
Though it’s not her usual area, on Friday morning, Philp drove the Hillside route to demonstrate the process, taking O’Malley Road, DeArmoun Road and Rabbit Creek Road to check temperature, snow depth and density. They’re steep, winding roads that could prove treacherous for school bus drivers if they’re not careful. Starting Thursday evening, about an inch of fluffy, soft snow fell on roads that were too slick to drive on just a day before, but the dusting actually added traction to the roads. Philp was confident that it would be safe to drive on Friday.
Philp’s preparation started Thursday night, when she checked in with the National Weather Service’s Anchorage office. She uses their weather predictions to decide if her team would hit the road the next morning.
Philp typically drives a short route around the Muldoon neighborhood before heading back to the office to make a series of phone calls: She will tell municipal officials that sand or salt is needed in specific problem areas, she’ll hear from drivers plowing parking lots at ASD schools, and she’ll call the state Department of Transportation and Public Facilities to find out what they’ve seen.
Early Friday morning, her Ford Explorer was one of the only cars without a plow attached driving Anchorage streets. She commended municipal road crews for their speedy work that helped make her decision an easy one on Friday.
“When I call and say we need sand somewhere, they’re on it,” Philp said. She credits them with “the fact that we didn’t have more stuck buses and more accidents on Tuesday. They did a fantastic job,” she said.
Philp does not take her role lightly. She knows that the assessment she provides helps determine whether up to 22,000 children will wait at nearly 8,000 bus stops to ride on roads headed for Anchorage schools that day. The district’s decision to close schools can lead to frustration and criticism from parents who suddenly need to figure out last-minute child care plans.
Philp said it’s a tough decision to make, and there is no one single answer as to what constitutes unsafe roads.
“It’s a bunch of different things, every day is a different day. I was getting people asking yesterday, ‘Are we closing school tomorrow?’ and it’s like, ‘I can’t tell you. I won’t know until I go out on the roads, until the middle of the night,’ ” Philp said. “Predictions are predictions, they’re not guarantees, so I can’t guarantee anything until we are physically out there looking at it.”
Snow falls on a portion of the Anchorage Hillside during a drive to assess the road conditions. (Marc Lester / ADN) Heather Philp, transportation director for Anchorage School District, turns around at Upper DeArmoun and Canyon Roads at about 3 a.m. (Marc Lester / ADN)
Sometimes the team’s early predictions don’t hold — early Thursday, Philp said, they thought schools could open, but the district changed course after some buses encountered roads coated with sheer ice. The forecast called for light rain and conditions were fine when drivers tested the roads early in the morning, she said, but the rain picked up just as drivers left for their routes.
“We didn’t expect it to full rain, we thought it was going to be a light rain, and it became very difficult for drivers, kids, other vehicles. We did have one bus that we had stuck, but that was really our only issue,” Philp said. “I was afraid I was going to end up off the road. Pretty bad, it was sheer ice, just black ice all the way through.”
The decision to close Anchorage schools twice this week drew social media backlash on either side of the issue. Some parents didn’t think roads were dangerous enough to keep their children home from school. Others felt the roads were too dangerous, and wondered why school hasn’t been canceled yet.
“It’s hard when like, most of the roads are bad but not all the roads are bad, or the Hillside is horrible but Muldoon area is not that bad, or whatever the case may be. I empathize with the decisions that the chiefs and the superintendent make,” Philp said. “I certainly don’t weigh lightly on the decisions.”
But, she added, “You have to look at the district really as a whole … You just can’t close a part of the district, we’ve tried it in the past. It just doesn’t work because often our students intermix throughout the entire district.”
After driving school buses for the Anchorage School District, Philp worked as a driver trainer and safety coordinator for the district. Her daughter also used to drive a school bus for ASD. Philp’s old routes included some of the Hillside’s steepest inclines, and she pointed to a spot where she frequently stopped to put chains on her bus tires along Rabbit Creek Road. Philp started driving before school buses were equipped with automatic “drop chains” a few decades ago. Today, bus drivers can affix “manual” chains to their tires for traction in deep snow, and the automatic rotating chains are meant to help the bus stop and start without spinning tires.
She’s grateful that drivers now have more options to get a grip. And despite recent examples of heavy snowfall causing extended school closures, Philp doesn’t think the district is more lenient than in the past when it comes to closing schools.
“I don’t think the standards have changed, I think that the weather patterns have changed,” Philp said. “We have had a lot more warm winters with freezing rain, rain precipitation, where we used to have just snow. And snow is not difficult, but snow in warm temperatures can be more difficult.”
She will sometimes stop near the top of a hill in Rabbit Creek to get out and walk the sidewalks that students will use in a few hours. It’s another icy surface to check, but Philp stresses that it’s important to make sure the roads are safe for everyone, not just school buses.
“It’s getting the big picture for everybody, not just for school buses on our road,” Philp said. “It’s about the kids.”
After a drive to evaluate Anchorage roadways, Heather Philp, transportation director for Anchorage School District, returns to her office at the bus facility. Philp typically gathers information from other district employees and other entities as part of the decision-making process about whether schools will close that day. (Marc Lester / ADN) Philp shows a notebook where she documents road condition reports from a variety of sources. The entry on Dec. 4 notes that schools were ultimately closed in the district that day. (Marc Lester / ADN)
Back at the district’s bus barn on Friday morning, Philp called officials with Reliant Transportation, the bus company that takes Anchorage students to school each day.
She jotted down what she heard in a spiral notebook, filled with observations and measurements from the last seven years. She flipped through pages and pages of notes, detailing specific areas of concern and what conditions she was worried about at the time.
Atop most of the pages are two words, distilling her guidance into a simple message: “We roll.”
School buses are parked in rows at the Anchorage School District’s transportation facility early on Friday. (Marc Lester / ADN)
