‘We want to open schools:’ Ware County Schools likely to be closed for another two weeks

WARE COUNTY, Ga. — Local schools in Ware County, Georgia might be closed for another two weeks, and the delay is putting an extra burden on some parents.

Army veteran Rosa Harmon and her three children have been without power since Hurricane Helene tore through Ware County, Georgia last Thursday.

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Two of her kids attend local public schools, but as of now, they’re not set to reopen until October 21st.

Harmon is worried they might fall behind.

“So, now for the parents that have to go and work, we’re going to have to find a way to home-school our kids temporarily, make sure our children don’t get behind,” said Harmon.

Ware County School Superintendent Bert Smith says persistent power outages plaguing both school facilities and staff, coupled with impassible roads are to blame for the reopening delays.

“So, we can’t move buses down those roads,” said Smith.

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Two of Ware County’s public schools are still without power eight days after the storm, as are at least 27 district employees.

But Smith said school staff aren’t sitting idly by as the county recovers from the storm.

“Our folks are standing up to man the feeding stations and the PODs that we talked about earlier. We’d love to open our schools, but we don’t have the manpower to provide childcare,” said Smith.

Smith added it’s everyone’s goal to open as soon as possible, and the reopening timeline could potentially change if recovery efforts progress faster than currently anticipated.

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“We want to open schools. We do not want to be out of school. We want to make sure our kids are getting the education they need,” said Smith.

It’s worthy of note, that the week of Oct. 13 was already a planned week break for the school district.

Smith told Action News Jax it’s possible the school year could be extended due to the lost classroom time, but that decision would come at a later date.

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