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COLORADO SPRINGS, COLO. -- Several school districts chose to close school Wednesday or operate on a two-hour delay. But how do school districts decide what is the right call?

For each district it's slightly different, but all said they use a number of factors to try to make the best decision possible.

In Colorado Springs School District 11 the decision-making process begins the night before.

"Our security personnel kind of assess the situation throughout the district, and they report back to our facilities operation folks out east of town, and then our facilities operation folks give a report to our director of transportation," Devra Ashby, Public Information Officer with District 11, said.

The director of transportation at District 11 also works with city personnel to check road conditions and road temperatures.

"The city has a way to monitor road temperatures, so we take that into consideration because often times it will snow, and then it will melt because the temperature of the road is warm, or it will freeze depending on how cold it is outside," Ashby said.

All of those factors, along with the weather forecast, are used to make a recommendation to the superintendent.

"The superintendent makes the call on whether school is delayed, closed or we're on for a full day," Ashby said.

But it's not an easy decision to make, and conditions can change from the time the call is made to the time students hit the streets.

At Cheyenne Mountain School District 12 a decision is made by 5:30 a.m.

There the superintendent and director of facilities divide the district in half and drive the roads beginning at 4 a.m.

Superintendent Walt Cooper said that's what they did Wednesday morning, and the roads were passable, so he chose to hold school as scheduled.

But by 8 a.m. it was a different story.

Cooper said he received several phone calls about dangerous road conditions, so he went back out to Star Ranch Road where conditions were quite different than before.

"It was mostly ice like all the way down the road," Emily Hammerton, a student who lives nearby, said. "There were people going halfway down the street and then turning around and coming back up."

Cooper later sent out an email and apologized to parents and said if he could go back he would make a different decision.

School officials also pointed out regardless of what call is made by the district, it's ultimately the parents who have the final say.

"Parents are the ultimate decision-makers on whether or not they think it's safe enough for their student to go to school, so we do respect their decision when they decide to keep their students home from school," Ashby said.

Officials at both District 11 and Cheyenne Mountain School District 12 said there is no penalty for keeping a child out of school because of the weather, and anytime a parent is unsure they can always call the school and have their child excused.