Perrin-Whitt CISD cancels school Thursday, Friday

Perrin-Whitt CISD announced on Facebook Wednesday that the district is closing both campuses for Thursday, Jan. 30, and Friday Jan. 31, due to illness.

Perrin High School Principal Loren Sell said students have been battling the flu since Monday.

“Starting on Monday, since we came back, we have had a large number of kids (…) out,” Sell said. “On the elementary campus, is really where it hit hard and some classes only had half the students in the class. We wanted gather a little more data and look Tuesday. Yesterday, was very similar to Monday."

He said Wednesday experienced the worst attendance rate of the three days which helped lead to the decision to close the campuses Thursday and Friday.

“But, we also realized that if we turned out school on a Tuesday and Wednesday, that’s not enough time to really break this cycle in our opinion and we wanted to tie it into the weekend if we could,” Sell said.

The principal said the students were not the only ones effected from the illness.

“It’s affecting the staff, that’s actually what started it on Monday, we had six or eight staff members on the elementary campus that were out,” he said. “Several more have gotten have come down on the flu, many of them have tested positive already with the flu and several have the symptoms.”

He said the junior varsity and varsity district basketball games planned against Throckmorton at Pirate Gym for Friday evening will still take place.

“Because of scheduling scenarios and conflicts, our plan is to play on Friday at the regularly scheduled time,” the principal said. “We are going to limit practice time and rearrange that schedule to where students can be off campus and have some time away from the general population.”

According to the district's Facebook these two days will be used to disinfect all surfaces in both campuses.

“The custodial staff has been hit hard too, so we have to outsource some different mechanisms to get our building sanitized and disinfected over the next two days,” Sell said.

He added, as of Wednesday, the days will not need to be made up because the district has enough bank minutes to allow for the days missed.

“Our main goal is to get everyone well and have students here,” Sell said. “To have a productive day, we’ve go to have our kids here and that’s our number one concern right now.”