Another cold day, another day off from school

For many schools around Minnesota, today is the fifth day this year that classes have been canceled due to extreme cold.

Each day's school closing creates obvious complications for parents, who may not have an alternative arrangement to care for their kids, and for educators, who need to determine how or whether to compensate for the loss of instruction time.

The Minneapolis schools have scheduled two makeup days so far.

How do the school districts make the decision to cancel classes, and what kind of responses are they getting from parents? And what's likely to happen at the end of the school year?