A public charter school in Cleveland is finding creative ways to keep lesson plans on track after a pipe burst in its building, forcing students to stay home.
"The floor was visibly wet, and then we had some water dripping from the ceiling," said Brooke King, the school's executive director. "The ceiling tiles had started to get loose, the furniture was wet, the materials, that kind of thing were wet."
This all happened at the Intergenerational School at the beginning of January. Since then, the school says they've sent home workbooks to the 250 students, and teachers are still reporting to work and creating online lesson plans for the kids to access from home.
"Just to be clear, any supports that we are doing in this interim time, anything that we are sending home, we are not expecting to necessarily count during our instructional hours, that we provided as a school," said King.
The school's insurance is also paying for daycare if the parents can't stay home from work, but some say this isn't enough.
"Generally, when school’s under construction or something, they figure out another way, they don’t just drop the ball, and I think our students ball got dropped," said parent Chrishawndra Matthews.
Matthews' first grade son Derrick goes to the school. She says she's able to stay home with him during the day to go over the workbooks and online tutorials because she works at night, but she fears that's not the case for every parent.
"What about the parents that are not literate? They maybe can’t go through that workbook with their child and then I have to think about the parents that don’t have a smart phone. So what if they don’t have access to those tools that they put on YouTube," said Matthews.
But a third grade parent told News 5 over the phone, she thinks the school is doing everything it can.
"The responsiveness has been fantastic.There’s only so much you can do in a situation like this. As frustrated as I am, it’s not really anybody’s fault,” said Siu Yan Scott.
King says she hopes to have the school back open on February 1st in some capacity.
