Harrison Students Get Long Break Combination Of Power Outages, Bad Roads
Kids who go to school in Harrison haven’t been, lately.
Thanks to storm-related power outages and bad roads, combined with Thanksgiving break, they’ll be out of school two weeks before returning to classrooms next Monday.
The Kootenai Joint School District was without power last Tuesday, so classes were canceled. The rest of last week, there was no school because a third of the families were plagued with blackouts and dangerous roads.
The district always starts its Thanksgiving break on Wednesday. So, when county road crews advised against opening the schools on Monday, district officials canceled today’s classes, too.
“We thought, what the heck, why come back for one day?” said Superintendent of Schools Ronald Hill.
The district serves 315 students who live east of Lake Coeur d’Alene.
Some 30 percent of them are near Turner Bay and Squaw Bay along state Highway 97, which was temporarily closed. Those areas were hit hard by last Tuesday’s ice storm, and still are without electricity. Downed trees and power lines have kept school buses from getting through.
“They finally got the road opened up, and we got a storm again last night,” Hill said Monday. “The road people were concerned about all of the trees that are leaning from that additional snow.”
The district has scheduled more than the number of classroom hours required by the state. So students can miss three more days after this week before they must make up the lost time, Hill said.
Hill has spent a few rough days answering the phone and explaining his decisions.
“You get criticized if you do have school, and criticized if you don’t,” he said.
It’s not all fun and games for the kids, either. Seventh-grader Sarah Johns has had just about enough of shoveling snow and playing Nintendo.
She and her brother, Scott, live 17 miles from Harrison in Rose Lake. Her best friend is more miles away, in Carlin Bay.
“I kinda want to go back, because it’s getting kind of boring,” she said.
, DataTimes