By BRENT MARTIN
St. Joseph Post
St. Joseph public schools hope to return to at least somewhat normal operations this week.
School Superintendent Doug Van Zyl says most school bus routes have opened, with only a few canceled today.
“So, some of our staff is feeling better, coming back in,” Van Zyl tells host Barry Birr on the KFEQ Hotline. “It’s not necessarily all COVID-related, because there’s a bunch of other crud going around out there. So now we’re down to nine routes and our community really did a nice job yesterday by getting the students into school. We had some really good attendance. It wasn’t hugely impacted by the bus routes not running.”
Simple addition led to the cancelation of public school last week.
Van Zyl says the counting began before the Martin Luther King, Jr. Holiday on Monday, the 17th.
“The Friday before, we had about 55 open classrooms, where we didn’t have enough substitutes or people from across the district to fill those positions,” according to Van Zyl. “We also had quite a few students out as well. So that helped a little bit, but that puts quite a bit of pressure on our staff.”
How to get students to class also became a problem.
Bus drivers, due to COVID-19 or other illnesses, couldn’t report to work, leaving about half the district’s roughly 60 daily bus routes without drivers. Enough returned today for the district to operate all but nine bus routes: 2, 14, 18, 19, 22, 41, 43, 54, 65 and all bus routes for students who attend the St. Joseph Early Learning Center. All bus routes for Bode, Edison, Ellison, Eugene Field, and Parkway Schools are back in operation.
Van Zyl says the district appreciates that staff stay home when they feel sick.
“We also know that it’s vital for our staff to be in front of our students and it’s vital for our students to be in the classroom. So, we’re doing everything that we can, in my opinion, to try to continue to move that forward,” Van Zyl says. “We also, because of some of the days that we’ve missed, we’ve eliminated our early out Wednesdays for the rest of the year. So that recaptures about 12 to 13 hours of instruction that we lost and we’re looking at other options as well to be able to recoup some of those hours.”
Students who had no transportation to school and reported it to their school will be excused from classes. Time will be given for makeup assignments.
More detail on bus routes can be found at www.sjsd.k12.mo.us.