As I am sure you are all aware, there is a PSPS (Public Safety Power Shutdown) planned to take place sometime tomorrow (Saturday, October 26th) mid to late morning. We have been advised to plan for a minimum of no power through Monday, more likely Tuesday, and possibly even through Wednesday.
We learned many things from the last PSPS, one of which is the importance of remaining open as a school district. As such, our plan is to remain open as long as we have running water and can provide a safe environment for the students.
Some of the questions that arose during and after the last PSPS:
- Can we have school open without a working fire alarm?
- Yes, we can. However, we are required to designate a person to be on "Fire Watch" and notify the fire department our fire alarms are offline. We did this for the past PSPS and plan to do the same this time.
- Will after school programs still be open?
- All of the Eureka City Schools ASES programs will be open.
- The City of Eureka Cooper Gulch program was open last time and we assume it will be again but will confirm.
- Will we have phone system?
- All sites have an old-fashioned landline and emergency phones that can be plugged into these lines. We are not publishing these numbers, but the classrooms will be able to contact the office via these lines. This line will also be able to be used to contact emergency services and parents on an as needed basis.
- Some sites will also have access to social media and will be monitoring Facebook.
o If you are unable to visit your student’s site in-person and need to discuss an urgent matter, please send a message on Facebook and your message will be communicated to the site. (Please note this is only available if Facebook is up and running.)
- Last time cell phones continued to work and this was our best communication system.
- Will meals be served for the students?
- While the meals will not be the traditional fare, we will have a limited number of meals for up to 4 days of school.
o We encourage parents who can to send their children to school with lunch.
- Is this just an effort by Eureka City Schools to not lose money?
- We believe keeping schools open is our responsibility to our community. Many parents who work in emergency services or in fields not impacted by the power outage rely on us to provide a safe place for their children to be while they work.
- Some of our children rely on our schools for meals.
- Even if we closed, the California Department of Education has provided a mechanism for us to apply for a waiver on closed days. If this was not approved, we would have the option of adding an extra day of instruction to the end of the school year for each day missed. Even given these options, we believe, for stability, it is best to stay open as long as we can.
- Will the Winzler Children's center be open?
- How many days of water will we have?
- Some of our schools are served by the Humboldt Community Water District and some by the City of Eureka. According to both agencies, we will have plenty of water.
- Do we have any generators?
- Yes, we have several, some of which we have purchased since the last outage. Maintenance will be working at various sites to provide a limited amount of hot water and run sewer lift pumps and basement sump pumps.
- Will the school network be down?
- Technology has a back-up generator that allows them to keep our infrastructure going as long as they have fuel. This will protect our vital technology components, but will not allow us to run computers or wireless at the sites.
Fred Van Vleck, Ed.D.
Superintendent
Eureka City Schools