An uptick in illnesses will have Knox Community School Corporation students working from home Friday. The school corporation has made January 31 an eLearning day.
Superintendent Dr. William Reichhart says 11.6 percent of the student body was absent Thursday, and it was actually worse earlier in the week. “We, on Monday, had over 100 elementary students out,” he explains. “We’ve also had a difficulty with our teachers and staff, trying to fill it with subs, because teachers and staff are sick themselves or they have students, their own children, who are sick.”
He says there were three teaching positions that the school corporation could not fill Thursday, and things only looked worse for Friday. “Going into the weekend, we’re hoping that our staff can recover, and we didn’t feel like we were going to have enough subs to cover all the classes,” Reichhart adds. “So it really boiled down to a staff issue of too many sick staff members.”
In the meantime, Reichhart says custodians continue efforts to sanitize the schools. “We have a sanitizing spray that we use to try to kill the germs, try to kill off this flu bug that’s going around, and they go into each classroom, hallway, student area and spray each evening. And we are trying to control it.”
Reichhart notes that the student attendance rate has improved slightly from the beginning of the week.
