IOWA, USA — School districts across Iowa are canceling classes as due to illness-related absences among both staff and students.
Classes are canceled Thursday and Friday for all 11 schools in the Marshalltown Community School District.
"Monday through Wednesday, five of our six elementary schools were at 12% to 18% absence for students," said Marshalltown superintendent Theron Schutte. "And it doesn't take a lot of staff absences for us to run into difficulties due to lack of substitute teachers."
Extracurriculars in the Marshalltown district are canceled on both Thursday and Friday.
The Melcher-Dallas Community School District is also closed Thursday and Friday. The district announced the cancelation on Wednesday, noting that 23% of students in junior high and high school are out sick.
The elementary saw 15% of its students call out, a number that doubled on Wednesday, according to the district.
The Melcher-Dallas cancellation will allow the building to be disinfected and undergo a deep cleaning. Varsity sports will still compete in their scheduled games while junior varsity and junior practices are canceled.
In southwest Iowa, illness-related absences are also hitting the Diagonal Community School District, where K-12 Principal Larry McNutt canceled some school events.
"Tuesday night, we were scheduled to play varsity girls and boys basketball, we only have six girls out for basketball being a school and we just had a couple of girls that were sick. So we had to we postpone the game," McNutt said.
While McNutt said students are beginning to return to school, the district doesn't want to take any chances.
"We have the UV lights we put on, we turn on the classroom every night to help with the spread of germs and then we clean throughout the day and disinfect desks," he said.
Schutte said students and staff will have to make these missed days the old-fashioned way.
"We're no longer able to have to make school days up by going to virtual learning that ended when the governor's original proclamation for COVID ended," he said.
Classes in the Marshalltown Community School District are scheduled to resume on Monday. The Melcher-Dallas School District has not definitively said when classes will resume.
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