001hello chris cooper superintendent of clearwater schools here with a brief update on january 14th i know you've heard about other schools and some situations with covet and what they're having to do unfortunately some districts happen to close down so i wanted to give you an update about where we are here in clearwater the good news is we're not in a crisis situation at this point our numbers might be trending a little above average but um we're not in an extraordinary situation right now uh today for instance that we're aware of we have 21 students out because of covid we have another 46 students that were absent today because they have a co-ed positive case in the households we're asking them to um to stay home for a period of time because we know the likelihood
002of household contacts becoming positive is pretty high overall we did have 135 students absent today that's a little above average for this time of year but not an alarming rate on the teacher side we had 14 teachers out today seven of whom were because of illness which could be coveted could be other things could be family illness so seven of those uh were because of illness the other seven were due to uh professional development things like maybe maternity leave those type of things that were non-illness related so again we're not in a crisis situation and i would just ask for your continued support as a community and parents to um keep sick kids at home uh keep as many uh issues as we can out of our schools so we can keep on keeping on
003i also wanted to update you on something that the state board acted on on wednesday you may have already heard about it if you've been watching the news but the allowance for a temporary emergency substitute teaching a license so if you go to our webpage home site our home page there is a article there that will lead you through the process if you're interested in that the requirements one thing that we've added in our district to to complete a a brief interview because as a district i'll have to sign off on we're going to employ this person to get so they can get the license and uh to feel good about doing that i want to have a conversation with all these folks before we complete that application process i want to remind everybody that
004there's no school next monday it was a scheduled professional development day so kids have a three-day weekend coming up here we are expecting some wintry weather this weekend as a superintendent i love it when it snows on the weekend because i don't have to worry about calling snow days but uh just a reminder that we are likely to get some winter weather at some point make sure that your information is up to date in powerschool your phone numbers and those type of things and so you can do that if you've changed numbers you can update that by letting our school offices know that also places to keep an eye on for school closings and if there's inclement weather weather the area the areas new stations of cake and ksn and kwch would be a good
005place to look i will obviously also send out a parent notification of phone call and email in the case of closure due to inclement weather so just wanted to update you on a few things here on this friday again our community's done a great job throughout this pandemic of dealing with it coming together and working uh things out so again we ask for your support and your help by uh not sending uh sick students uh to school with that that's really all i have for today this mr cooper signing off needs to sign off of when i was a principal for years and years work hard have fun and be your best self