No School on Friday, January 14, 2022

Thank you for your continued support of our students, staff, and school community. We wanted to take a moment to provide an update regarding some ongoing challenges and their impacts due to COVID-19 and its variants. In an effort to provide you with as much time as possible, we are letting you know that we are canceling school tomorrow, Friday, January 14, 2022.

In addition to the increased number of positive COVID-19 cases among students and staff, an additional challenge that has reached a peak is that our pool of qualified and licensed substitute teachers is in very short supply. When available, our substitute teachers do an incredible job of working with our students to ensure that learning continues and that our classrooms are positive, productive, and safe. Our current reality is that we simply do not have enough substitutes to appropriately maintain operations.

Throughout the school year, our entire staff has worked together to ensure that we provide classroom coverage when our demand for substitute teachers exceeds the available supply. However, we have reached a point with staffing and coverage the requires that we “hit a reset” extending the weekend, as we can no longer sustain classroom coverage internally when substitutes are not available. 

Thank you to our amazing staff for doing a tremendous job of remaining flexible and going above and beyond to not only provide great instruction in their own classrooms, but also covering classrooms for colleagues when substitute teachers have not been available. 

All activities scheduled for today, Thursday, January 13, 2022, will remain as scheduled. There will be no practices or activities on Friday, January 14, 2022.

Please afford us grace as we work to problem-solve this challenge and know that student safety and student learning are at the forefront of our decision-making in these instances. We implore you to help over the long weekend by exercising best mitigation practices. Together we will overcome this.

Sincerely,

Stu Moeckel

Superintendent of Schools

Eudora USD #491