Yesterday, I wrote about attendance at DISD, and by all accounts, what teachers and administrators in the schools are observing lines up with the district’s report that attendance was normal.
“DISD parents don’t do that,” one Hillcrest High School teacher told me when I asked if parents held their kids out of school last week.
I also spoke with Ron Jones, the current principal of Franklin Middle School, who will become Hillcrest’s principal on Monday. He said parents were rational about the swine flu situation, and put their trust in the school to keep them informed. Both campuses had a thorough scrub-down, teachers distributed hand sanitizer before every class, and parents didn’t keep their kids out of school.
The biggest challenge was the students, he said. There were multiple occasions of rumors getting started via student text messages about classmates leaving campus because they had swine flu. This obviously wasn’t the case, and teachers dealt with it.
