In a series of weather and utility difficulties with Monroe County Community Schools this past month, students were left with a rain day.
Earlier this month, students at Bloomington High School North, Hoosier Hills Career Center and Tri-North Middle School were sent home due to utility outages. Bloomington North and Hoosier Hills lost power during the day due to a storm, and Tri-North lost all water utilities.
Andrew Clampitt, public relations and informational officer for MCCSC, said both transportation and building utility services coordinated to get the students home as soon as possible.
“The perfect storm happened at the exact same time,” Clampitt said. “The students had already arrived at school. We immediately had a plan in place, got the students home. I was pleased with the communication overall.”
Though both situations were out of the schools’ control due to weather, the district had a set plan in place to react to the situation.
Clampitt said vibrations from construction going on at 17th Street shattered the main going to Tri-North, removing the water.
Chris Ciolli, director of building operations for Monroe County Community Schools Corporation, said the Tri-North incident was particularly out of their control. He said this is the first time he is aware of schools the district having to dismiss school due to a utility outage.
However, Ciolli said the district’s type of insurance policy allows them to react quickly. The Capital Projects Fund allocates funds to schools using it to operate and make appropriate decisions in situations such as Sept. 9.
He said Bloomington North has an emergency backup generator, but due to the size of the building, it is not possible to power the facility in such cases. He said in this situation, where the power would be on again soon after the school day had ended, the cost of getting a larger generator from possibly hours away outweighed the benefits.
Ciolli said in an extreme situation, arrangements for a larger generator could be made. However, it would not make much sense.
“When you’re looking at a one hour or even eight hour power outage, it wouldn’t be worthwhile, because you’d have to bring it from out of town,” Ciolli said. “So in an extreme situation, we could make those arrangements.”
He said the CPF allow the district to fund any emergency situation, but this emergency was not as expensive as one might think. He said the main costs that day were manpower, including bringing in a subcontractor to assist repairs.
In the event of a year with no emergencies, CPF may be reallocated to the state board of accounts, Ciolli said. He said it’s an insurance policy meant to help cover expenses in the cases of bad weather or emergency situations that cannot always be prevented.
Ciolli said if a situation such as this ever occurred again, he would want to improve communication on his own end with others in the situation, particularly between building staff and utilities staff.
The Indiana Department of Education has approved the waiver of the time missed by students at Bloomington North, Tri-North and Hoosier Hills. These students will not be required to make up the five hours of time lost during this school day.
“Overall, when we did our post-op, we were very pleased with how the plan played out — lots of positives,” Clampitt said. “Transportation did a phenomenal job getting the kids home.”
