All schools and programs shut down on those days
Due to staff shortages with so many members out sick, Park Hill School District has announced it will shut down Thursday and Friday of this week, with all of its schools, facilities and programs closed on those days.
The district made the announcement in an email to parents on Tuesday afternoon. Here is the body of the email:
“Since we wrote to you this past Thursday, we have been able to keep school open for another few days. This was thanks to a brief increase in people taking substitute jobs and to several employees returning after illness.
The Current Situation in Park Hill:
We continue to have an extremely high number of staff members who are getting sick, so we are still in a staffing crisis. As this situation continues, we cannot sustain the current pace throughout the whole week, with more and more staff falling ill.
We will not have enough staff to properly supervise students during the school day by the end of this week.
Next Steps:
We will shut down on Thursday and Friday during the school day. All our schools, offices, facilities and programs will close during their regular hours. This includes the Park Hill Online Academy, Adventure Club and tuition preschool.
Evening activities might be available, on a case-by-case basis, if we can find enough staffing. Each building will communicate with participating families about these activities as they work through the staffing issues.
We will not use any of our five AMI (alternative methods of instruction) days to go to virtual learning, because we will not have enough healthy staff members to do this. We will not make these two days up at the end of the school year.
Staff will get paid for this time according to their usual schedule, pending Board of Education approval on Thursday night.
How You Can Help:
Many of you have kindly offered to help during this crisis. You can make a difference in two ways: please keep your children home when they are sick, and please consider applying to be a substitute in our district (www.parkhill.k12.mo.us/work-in-park-hill/substitutes).”