Englewood Schools Won’t Re-Open Until ‘At Least’ Wednesday

With power still out at Englewood’s middle school, high school and Quarles Early Childhood Center Friday, school officials said they don’t anticipate opening schools again until “at least” next Wednesday, Nov. 7.

“PSE&G, as they’ve told many people, are talking about a Friday, Nov. 9 date for power; it may be sooner,” Englewood Board of Education president Stephen Brown told Patch. “We hope that’s a conservative estimate that PSE&G has given us, but we won’t be able to open up until, at the earliest, Wednesday.”

A notice posted on the school district’s website Friday indicated that Tuesday, which is election day and was supposed to have been a day off from school, would be “a full school day for all students, teachers and staff,” but Brown said that is no longer the case, and that the notice would be coming down.

“There was discussion, and the hope was that we would get power over the weekend and we would convert a day that we did not have school, Nov. 6, into a school day,” he said. “But without power today and the estimate that PSE&G has given us, that message on the website is going to change.”

He added that even if “by some miracle” power were to be restored Sunday or Monday, “we would still need some time to put the school district back online.”

If it does work out to re-open schools on Wednesday, school officials hope to have school on Thursday and Friday as well

Those days—Nov. 8 and 9—were scheduled to be off days because of the Teachers Convention, but the damage left by Sandy forced the New Jersey Education Association (NJEA) to cancel its convention in Atlantic City earlier in the week.

“So in our mind, if you’re not going to the convention, you’re available to work,” Brown said, noting that he and Superintendent Donald Carlisle were in agreement on that point. “That said, those days are off by statute. But the hope is that the teachers understand that students have been out of school just about a week-and-a-half, if not two weeks, and we need to get them back in school.”