After Wintry Mix Blankets Area, Warming Trend Expected Today

But other districts, such as Prince William, made the call after the school day began, sending some parents scrambling to find babysitters and rides for their children.

Marsha Tisch decided at 5:30 a.m. that she would not be one of them. She saw the forecast, figured school would close early and made her own call: Her kids would stay home.

"Probably the county wasted a whole lot of money," said Tisch, who has a 15-year-old daughter at Battlefield High School in Prince William and a 17-year-old son at Brentsville District High School. "They had to pay for all the buses to get the kids into school and then they turned around and sent them right home again."

With closed schools came cancellations of many evening events packed into the weeks before winter break. In Loudoun, schools rescheduled student guitar concerts and elementary school geography bees and canceled a PTO holiday craft night.

Margarita Dale of Herndon said she thought schools should announce early release schedules before the school day begins -- unlike in Fairfax, where word was put out at 10 a.m. But her seventh- and ninth-grade sons, she said, were not concerned.

Sam Hadjat, however, was not. Hadjat is the manager of the Sunglass Hut at Congressional Plaza in Rockville, where bad weather cooled business to the point that he had sold only two pairs of Ray Bans by closing time -- less than half the normal sales.

It had cooled his spirits a bit, too: The icy weather forced him to slow down behind the wheel of his black Mazda RX-8 sports car.

"I mean, I really don't like it," Hadjat, 23, said of the cold rain. "It slows everything down."

Staff writers Nick Anderson, Lori Aratani, Michael Alison Chandler, Susan DeFord, Frederick Kunkle and William Wan contributed to this report.