Due to conditions, there will be NO school today. While road conditions are mostly clear in Hockinson, some area roads present potentially unsafe driving conditions for student and staff travel to our schools. Safety is our number one priority.
There will be no Cascadia Tech bus and no programs at the Hockinson Community Center. All before and after school programs are canceled, including community education programs and athletics. Please visit our website or monitor the local media for updates and details.
Parent Email from Superintendent Steve Marshall
HSD Families:
I am sending you this email to explain how I arrived at this morning’s decision to cancel school. As I wrote to our staff earlier this morning, I am sure this decision left a number of you scratching your heads.
Last night, I surveyed our staff on their road conditions, as many live outside of Hockinson. The survey confirmed that road conditions varied considerably around the county. Nealy 25% indicated that the roads around their homes were unsafe. Consequently, we had a number of absences for which we did not have substitutes.
HSD Transportation staff and I evaluated road and campus conditions early this morning. Nearly all main roads in Hockinson were clear and dry. However, side roads were not, nor were the roads in surrounding areas. In fact, area road conditions deteriorated overnight as yesterday the snow melted and iced up overnight. That was also the case with the parking lot at HHES. While road conditions looked promising yesterday afternoon, the same roads were covered in ice this morning. Morning road conditions presented a safety hazard we could not ignore and could not remedy before the start of school.
Finally, the School Board and I understand that late starts and closures impact your family. We do our best to notify you as early as possible. We communicated our intent to start 2 hours late yesterday evening, and published our ultimate decision to close by 6:30 am this morning. While there was a chance that road conditions would improve today, I could not predict if they would improve by the time our buses started their routes at 8:30 am or HHES started at 10 am. So, I made the difficult decision for our schools to remain closed today.
With these three snow days, the last day of school is now Tuesday, June 20.
Student and staff safety is our top priority. As communicated yesterday, the School Board and I are also committed to your student’s learning. We hope to see all of our students back in the classroom this coming Monday, which - go figure - is also the first day of HHS Spring Sports practices. Let’s hit the ground running!
Sincerely,
Steve Marshall
HSD Superintendent