Warm wishes!

 

Unless the weather changes drastically tonight, Issaquah schools and school activities will resume on a normal schedule tomorrow, Friday, December 1.

 

Thank you for your flexibility during this week's winter storm that crippled the region. While we always want students to return to classrooms as soon as possible, we put their safety first.

 

For the past three mornings, staff in the Transportation Department drove roads throughout the District to gauge their condition beginning at 3 a.m. Today, Thursday, Nov. 30, many main roads were safely navigable. However, countless arterial and neighborhood roads-including those surrounding several schools-were still icy and treacherous.

 

While we could have chained bus tires and eliminated mountain transportation routes, we had concerns for the safety of student walkers, student drivers, and parents driving to snow stops. Even as administrators continued to assess road conditions at 10 a.m., they witnessed vehicles sliding into mailboxes and ditches on the Plateau and Cougar Mountain. Preston and Newcastle had similar conditions. Coupled with extremely slick sidewalks, we felt students would be in jeopardy. We made the safest decision we could.

 

Because our District spans 110 square miles, weather conditions from one end to the other-or one elevation to another-can vary significantly. Our community has strongly requested that we do not "carve out" neighborhoods or schools with safely navigable routes to have school while excluding neighborhoods or closing schools that have icy conditions. We make decisions about school schedules Districtwide.

 

Again, thank you for your ability to adjust as many of our busy lives came to a standstill this week.

 

What happens now to account for the three missed days?

 

• Middle schools will still have an early-release day tomorrow.
• Elementary and middle schools have moved the last day of the trimester from Dec. 1 to Dec. 6. That means report cards will be slightly delayed and middle school students will switch to new elective classes beginning next Thursday.
• We are considering how to adjust the school calendar to accommodate three make-up days. Currently, the last day of school is Friday, June 22. The teachers' contract states that the District must renegotiate the calendar if we do anything but make up the three days on June 25, 26, and 27. We are looking at all of our options, and our goal is to communicate the decision as soon as possible so families can plan accordingly.

 

Urgent notifications

• As a reminder, we try to make a decision about school closures and schedule changes by 5:30 a.m. If we have a schedule modification, we notify www.schoolreport.org, which sends the information to local television and radio stations. You can sign up to receive e-mail notifications directly from the School Report website. (Currently, the website is supporting its emergency notification page; by next week, the subscription function will be available again.)
• In the District, we post notifications on our homepage, www.issaquah.wednet.edu. We program phone messages at the District's and each school's mainline to convey closure information.
• We have also created this Urgent Notification listserv group to send out important e-mail notifications. The Urgent Notification listserv uses each school's individual listserv and the District's listserv to send out the same message. If you have received duplicate messages from "ISD Urgent Notification," we apologize. You were sent a message from each District and school listserv account to which you subscribe.