Princeton High students to learn remotely this week due to staff shortages, menu options at other district schools to be reduced
Princeton High School students will learn remotely for the first week of January due to staffing issues related to the pandemic.
Students at the other five schools in the district will learn in person because those schools are not facing staffing shortages. Breakfast and lunch options will be reduced though because the district’s food service provider, Nutri-Serve, is facing staff shortages due to COVID.
“We appreciate the fact that many parents will need to keep their students home on Monday, and we will work to provide the most robust options possible for students who will be remote. At the same time, we believe that for many students being in school is the best possible option, and we continue to strive to keep schools open,” Superintendent Carol Kelley wrote in an email to parents Sunday night.
District officials will make decisions to switch to remote learning on a class-by-class or school-by school basis to minimize the number of students who are remote. Kelley said things are changing quickly, and new guidelines from the state could mean a change in plans in the coming days.
“In the meantime, please think carefully about the mask your student wears tomorrow. More than ever, it is crucial to wear a high-quality mask, such as a KN95, N95, or surgical mask. We discourage sending students to school in cloth masks during this period of heightened transmission,” Kelley wrote.
Students who will attend school in person have been advised to bring lunches if possible due to the shortage of cafeteria workers.
If a student is unvaccinated and someone in the household is COVID positive, awaiting test results, or showing symptoms, the student should be kept home and school officials should be notified. PCR saliva tests are available for students at all of the schools in the district, Kelley said.
“Recent days have been difficult for many PPS students, families, and staff who have received positive test results or have been unable to obtain a test,” Kelley wrote. “Thank you for your continued efforts to support our public schools.”
Krystal Knapp is the founding editor of Planet Princeton. Follow her on Twitter @krystalknapp. She can be reached via email at editor AT planetprinceton.com. Send all letters to the editor and press releases to that email address.
Here’s what day 1 of virtual learning consisted of: watching the gym teacher on a computer during gym class and busy work assignments in the other classes. No one participates in these classes so it’s six hours of sitting and watching the screen. It’s painful to sit through and is a waste of time. Please, please, please, reopen PHS for in-person instruction as soon as possible. If that’s not possible, please let students out of virtual school so that we can learn something by doing something else.
What is wrong with the Princeton Public Schools? Today, due to the icy roads, they delayed the schools opening, but they completely messed it up for the high school. They sent out phone and email messages at 7am that the high school would be delayed for two hours. And then, 50 minutes later, they sent out email messages, but not phone, that the PHS was really only on a 90 minute delay. Is it so hard to get this stuff correct? The students are treated harshly on tests when they make a single minor error (this is a mental health issue that the district doesn’t seem to want to address), yet the school gets to make these mistakes all the time?
And yesterday, for no apparent reason, they changed the class schedule at PHS after the school day had already begun! It caused chaos for many teachers who though their class was meeting at one time and then it wasn’t. Another crazy day of virtual education at PHS.