TOWN OF BROWNVILLE, New York (WWNY) – Students in the General Brown Central School District have been learning from home for the last two days.
It’s all because of a combination of sickness and staffing issues.
“Initially, I found out we were probably 13 teachers short, or subs short. We had that many absences,” said Superintendent Barbara Case. “Eventually the number grew to 15, here at the high school only, and then we began to look at the other two buildings and realized we were actually short many teachers.”
By the time the bell was supposed to ring on Thursday morning, a total of 31 staff members were absent. That number rose to 39 staff members by Friday.
“This due to some Covid. It’s due to other illnesses, and it’s also dealing with families, teachers that have their own families, and their own children are sick. I really think we had the perfect storm at General Brown right now,” said Case.
It’s a combination of factors that only added to a school district already dealing with a shortage of substitutes.
“We didn’t have enough substitute teachers. When you start getting into that volume, we might have that many subs, but we certainly don’t have that many subs to come in on one day,” said Case.
General Brown students might be learning from home, but for the teachers who could make it in, it was business as usual.
“It kinda feels like a little bit of a deja vu,” said Dustin Newvine, a physics teacher.
A sense of familiarity from remote learning during much of the pandemic has made the transition back to virtual lessons a smooth process for the educators at General Brown.
“It’s been good in the sense that we don’t have to lose all of the time from virtual learning. We get to still have assessments, and provide lessons to students even when they are home,” said Newvine.
Plans are to have students return to the classroom for in-person learning on Monday barring a continued increase in absences.
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