All public schools and Department of Education offices in the St. Thomas–St. John District will be closed Friday, October 23, as continued electrical grid instability disrupts reliable power service. The department announced the districtwide closure Thursday evening, citing the safety of students, faculty, staff and school communities.
Education officials said WAPA’s ongoing difficulties restoring and maintaining reliable electricity made the closure necessary. The department acknowledged that families and employees would have to make last-minute changes to their schedules and childcare arrangements, and apologized for the short notice.
The announcement followed WAPA’s disclosure at 5:20 p.m. Thursday that it could not begin the two-hour power rotations announced earlier in the afternoon. The authority said certain feeders posed a heightened risk of causing a major districtwide outage, leaving some customers without electricity until the issue could be resolved.
Friday’s districtwide closure follows the shutdown of eight school sites Thursday because of the unstable electrical grid. Those sites included Sprauve School, Bertha C. Boschulte Middle School, Ivanna Eudora Kean High School, Joseph Gomez Elementary School, Yvonne Milliner-Bowsky Elementary School, Joseph Sibilly Elementary School, Edith Williams Alternative Academy and the Raphael O. Wheatley Skill Center.
The department said it would continue monitoring conditions and communicating with WAPA as stabilization efforts continued.
