Is there anything more exciting than a snow day? Every time a strong winter storm bears down on the Reno area, I still get the giddy flashbacks of listening to the radio and crossing our fingers as kids. Even all the pains in the butt and disruptions snow days cause in the adult world can’t dampen that sweet frozen nostalgia.

But they are disruptive. And so while I love to bag on the Washoe County School District, I thought their recent idea to have weather zones so not all the schools had to be cancelled when there wasn’t a need for it was a pretty good one. Washoe County has more microclimates than you can shake a thermometer at, after all.

But a good idea only translates into good policy if the planning and execution is done properly, and here WCSD returned to incompetent form. They only announced the new weather zone policy on January 31 (a Thursday), tried it out the following Tuesday, and rescinded the policy on Wednesday. Less than a week between initial rollout and ignominious retreat from utter failure! Although in all seriousness, I appreciate they bailed on it right away and returned to the status quo ante, rather than stubbornly claim that it worked while wrapping their broken plan with figurative duct tape.

But that wasn’t the end of WCSD’s bad week. Last year, the district announced a new policy of “digital days” whenever a snow day was called, so kids could do their homework at home and the actual school day wouldn’t have to be made up at the end of the school year. The policy itself was ridiculous – the “digital day” assignments in no way equated to a regular school day (at least I hope not). When I heard about it, I was surprised that it would even pass legal muster as an official school day.

Well, I was right to wonder, because it turns out digital days aren’t legally sufficient school days. The state Superintendent told WCSD Superintendent Traci Davis this in a letter a month ago — a letter sent only after the state officials had learned about the policy via local news, because WCSD never bothered consulting state regulators. Davis’ solution was to apparently just ignore the warnings and continue to flout state law. Even now that the problem has become public, the district is stubbornly insisting on maintaining the “digital day” policy, clearly gambling that the validity of high school credits or even diplomas won’t be at risk. I’m a believer generally that forgiveness beats permission, but when you’re already under fire for easing up standards to artificially inflate graduation rates, maybe this is a bridge too far.

Both of these embarrassments have at their respective hearts the same root cause – unforgivably incompetent management.

In both cases, easily foreseeable problems were either ignored or not foreseen. Public input was not sought ahead of time. The rollouts were poorly timed and poorly explained to the public. In short, both the elected members of the school board and the army of superfluous and over-paid administrators failed to think ahead or plan ahead.

The result was that two ideas which may have actually had some merit were executed disastrously, and the trust in a crucial public institution continues to erode in our community.

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At some stage, pointing out the failures of WCSD is depressingly simple. What should be shocking and career-ending for any superintendent with the tiniest shred of shame has become routine.

But there is a larger lesson that other government bodies can and must heed. Good ideas, poorly executed, become terrible, expensive, and self-destructive policy. And of course bad ideas that sound good before you think them through are even worse.

Already in the first week of our legislative session we have some hints of both the type of colossally poor planning that has become almost de rigueur at WCSD, and hopeful signs that cooler heads may prevail. The first is the Sprinklecare saga, a bill from last session which promised health coverage for all, cost tens of millions of dollars we don’t have, upend our entire health-care industry, and potentially run afoul of various federal law – all in a four page, detail-less bill from last session which Gov. Brian Sandoval wisely vetoed. During last year’s gubernatorial campaign, then-candidate Steve Sisolak vowed he would have signed it.

Both Assemblyman Mike Sprinkle and Gov. Sisolak have, to their credit, acknowledged (sort of) the folly of the previous attempt, and are taking a longer, more deliberative approach. But the fact that it took a governor’s veto to stop it means that a majority of 2017’s legislators – most of whom have returned to Carson City – didn’t bother to do the most basic thinking about the details of a monumentally impactful piece of legislation. Multiply that times the hundreds of changes to our laws we can expect to see this session, and despair.

Remember, lawmakers – what matters about the law is not your good intentions, not how cool you thought the idea was at the bar or hotel room bull session, but the precision and planning involved in the actual language of the proposed statute. Carelessness can be even worse than malice – the merely careless don’t have their consciences nagging at them when lives are being ruined by their folly, but the damage can be just as great, if not greater.

In short, study the Washoe County School District. See how they do business, and they absorb all the lessons about how NOT to legislate or lead.

If lawmakers of any political variety can keep that in mind for the next four months, all that high-mindedness we’re hearing now may actually lead to a successful – or at least, minimally destructive – legislative session.

Orrin Johnson has been writing and commenting on Nevada and national politics since 2007. He started with an independent blog, First Principles, and was a regular columnist for the Reno Gazette-Journal from 2015-2016. By day, he is an attorney in Reno. Follow him on Twitter @orrinjohnson, or contact him at [email protected].