Social media was on fire Tuesday night with angry moms raging against the Public Schools of Robeson County because their youngins’ school had problems with the heating systems earlier that day, when temperatures outside were struggling to escape the teens.

The weather has been a nightmare this week for school officials, who must deal with 42 schools, almost 24,000 students and twice that number of parents. On Tuesday school started on a two-hour delay because school officials didn’t want children waiting on buses in temperatures around 14 degrees, but on Wednesday, when the forecast was the same, school started on time — go figure — but ended early to try to get children home before a winter storm that delivered as promised — snow and treacherous roads. Thursday there was no school because of the winter storm, and there will be none today as well.

School can wait; safety first.

School officials have been playing with a really bad hand, and no matter their decisions, parents were going to be upset. Folks don’t like to change their schedules to accommodate the schools. They prefer it being the other way around.

We know there were problems with heat at Lumberton High, Red Springs High and Littlefield Middle schools, and were told that kids were shuffled into other warmer parts of the building and repairs were made in time for classes to be normal on Wednesday. But we also have been told there were heating issues at other schools, but in a statement provided by the school system on Wednesday afternoon, amazingly, those schools were not even identified.

We can be understanding of the problem the school system confronts. Our schools are old and failing apart, and when there are 41 of them — we aren’t counting West Lumberton Elementary, which was ruined by Hurricane Matthew — and temperatures are as extreme as they have been this week, there are going to be breakdowns. That is one reason we supported the school consolidation plan of 2016 that would have closed 30 schools and given us 14 new ones that presumably would have functioning climate systems. Although the plan died in Raleigh, it was never embraced locally, either by the school board or the public, and this week provided evidence of why that remains a head-scratcher.

Our problem with the local school system is not the breakdowns, but the system’s clumsiness in getting information out to the public about problems. We don’t blame Tasha Oxendine, the schools spokesperson, because she is dependent on administrators getting her the information. It is typically tardy and woefully lacking for details.

We know there are a lot of moving parts, but how could the school system on Wednesday night not be able to provide a list of schools that had been without heat the day before?

We heard multiple complaints from parents about how their calls to the schools or central office just kept on ringing, and when someone did pick up, their questions went unanswered.

This newspaper stood ready the entire time to use our resources — newsroom staff, our print publication, robesonian.com and social media — to get the information to the public, but we can only do that if the information is available.

There is little new here. The school system has long been clumsy when it comes to public relations, and we have come to know that folks are simply afraid to say anything because the wrong thing could bring consequences.

That, folks, is the result of a Board of Education that does not understand its job is to establish policy and allow administrators to implement it and run the system. It clogs the information pipeline unnecessarily, and to the frustration of those of us who deliver information and those of you who depend on it.