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Don't celebrate yet, kids.
Update below.
Kids might have rejoiced over yesterday's
school closure in San Francisco — even as their parents scrambled to find child care — but the district itself took a huge financial wallop.
Per
KQED education reporter Ana Tintocalis, closing schools for one day cost San Francisco Unified some $2 million in lost revenue, or about $42 a student. The district hopes to recoup that money from an emergency relief fund distributed by the State Department of Education.
San Francisco Unified certainly qualifies, given the spate of power outages that occurred throughout the city yesterday, district spokeswoman Gentle Blythe told KQED. The resulting shutdown turned the city's downtown corridor into a virtual dead zone, with luxuriantly empty BART trains and unclogged sidewalks.
San Francisco public schools sustained no major damage, according to the district's
Twitter feed, after girding themselves for #hellastorm with hella sandbags.
If the gale didn't live up to its namesake, it got a hell of a reception.
Granted, students returning to class today face at least one downer: SF Unified may tack an extra day of instruction on at the end of the year to make up for yesterday's loss.
Update, 7 p.m.: Blythe tells
SF Weekly that the district will not add that extra day. She was confident the district will be made whole.
