LOUISVILLE, Ky. (WDRB) – Atherton High School is the only JCPS school closed Friday, Nov. 16, because of a power outage. All other JCPS schools are open as normal.
It was different on Thursday when some JCPS students arrived to schools without power. That prompted many parents to sign out their kids early.
Power went out for more than 70,000 in Kentucky, including seven JCPS schools. According to the district, Atherton High School, Jacob Elementary, Tully Elementary, Bowen Elementary, Kenwood Elementary, Jeffersontown Elementary and Zachary Taylor Elementary were without power Thursday.
“We are working with LG&E and gathering more information about when power will be restored so we can best accommodate students,” JCPS Communications Director Renee Murphy told WDRB News in an email. The company has said schools without power are at the top of its priority list.
The district did not cancel classes but allowed parents and guardians to pick up or sign out their children at schools without electricity.
Cars lined Dundee Road outside Atherton High School, one of the schools that lost power as icy weather moved through the region, around noon Thursday.
Elias Craigo-Snell, a 14-year-old Atherton freshman, said that students stayed in the gym for a bit at the start of the day before moving to their first-period classes.
“They didn’t want to do any classwork or anything with the state that, having no power, so we just stayed in the classrooms,” Elias said outside the school after his father picked him up from school. “… The classrooms were pretty cold, but they got some of the main rooms heated.”
“They kind of got to hang out with their friends and text their parents,” Bonnie Wright said after signing out her daughter, a 17-year-old Atherton senior who drove to school Thursday.
Seth Craigo-Snell, Elias’s father, and Wright said they learned of Atherton’s power situation after receiving notifications from JCPS.
“I feel really good about the way they communicated, and it kind of stinks that it’s going on for so long, but it’s understandable as well,” Craigo-Snell said.
“It’s clearly just a lost day from an instruction perspective, so I figure we should have him at home, catch up on things that he can do there rather than sitting here,” he added.
Craigo-Snell is a consultant who works from home near the school, and Wright, a human resource manager, estimated she had to take off an hour of work to sign out her daughter.
Because the school’s phones were out, Wright said she could not call Atherton and have her daughter released early.
“I understand they’re just following their emergency procedures, but I wish I could have just let them know to let her go,” she said.
The outages also frustrated some staff at the schools, notably custodians and plant managers who are members of Service Employees International Union Local 320. The union said some of its members who work at schools without power have been denied emergency leave as part of their contracts.
The union urged JCPS “to exercise greater caution in the future when bad weather impacts our community, and honor employee leave policies.”
“We are investigating this situation to find out why JCPS employees are being forced to work in the dark, without heat, rather than be allowed to use their earned leave time,” SEIU 320 said in a statement. “How does the district propose that second-shift custodians clean a building with no lights?”
Jefferson County Teachers Association President Brent McKim said he also heard concerns from some teachers at affected schools, but he said those concerns should be balanced against the fact that many of those kids would be sent to homes without heat or power.
“That’s a consideration that I’m sure they have to take into account,” said McKim, whose union represents some 6,000 JCPS teachers.
He noted that JCTA was also without power for part of Thursday and affected the union's email server, so he was unsure to what extent members were trying to reach JCTA.
Sue Foster – president of AFSCME Local 4011, which represents about 4,000 classified JCPS workers – said she heard no complaints from her membership about working in schools without power.
She noted that lunch service was not affected by the outages.
“Our operations department is probably the most important department that we need in our schools on days like today,” Foster said.
Murphy suggested that parents visit the JCPS website to sign up for One Call alerts to stay up to date on issues like power outages.
Click here for the outages map for LG&E.
Click here for Duke Energy's outage map.
Copyright 2018 WDRB Media. All Rights Reserved.
