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, January 27 and 28, 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.
We understand that this will be incredibly challenging for our families, so we want you to know that we exhausted every option before we got to this. We will continue to monitor the situation to try to make the best decisions possible for our students, our staff and our families. Thank you for your support and understanding of the Park Hill School District as we face these challenges together.
Feeding Your Family:
We know this shutdown was sudden and may lead to some unexpected hardships. Our district has partnered with Feed Northland Kids to distribute Community Food Kits every Wednesday from 2-5:30 p.m. at the Support Services building at 9501 N. Seymour Ave. The food kits will feature dry goods and bread. Families of four or fewer will receive one kit. Based on the number in the household, larger families may receive two or three kits. We also have other food resources at the bottom of our COVID information page.
