Lake County schools to stay closed Tuesday due to Valley fire

Most public school students in Lake County aren’t slated to return to classes this week, but officials hope to start opening campuses farthest from the Valley fire by Wednesday.

All Lake County public schools will remained closed again Tuesday due to the wildland fire, county Superintendent of Schools Brock Falkenberg said Monday afternoon.

School officials in the north county at Lakeport, Upper Lake and Lucerne are making preparations to reopen schools there Wednesday, he said. Together, those campuses serve slightly more than 2,600 of the county’s 9,100 public school students.

Meanwhile, schools in Kelseyville and in Lower Lake in the Konocti school district will remain closed through the weekend. The schools in those communities serve about 4,800 students.

In hard-hit Middletown, “we don’t have an answer” when classes might resume, Falkenberg said.

The Middletown district’s five schools - including Coyote Valley Elementary in Hidden Valley Lake - all survived the inferno that hit Saturday night, and each of them appears to have suffered only minimal damage, he said.

“But every single one of them had fire right up to the edge of it,” he said.

Some of the ground near those schools was still smoldering Monday when Falkenberg visited each campus.

The community’s schools last year served nearly 1,700 students.

Each Middletown school will now require a “full assessment” and any needed repairs will have to be completed before campuses can be reopened, Falkenberg said.

Administrators for the Middletown district and the county are looking at “creative” ways to get the community’s students back in class as soon as possible, he said. That includes considering offers of help from school officials in nearby counties.

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You can reach Staff Writer Robert Digitale at 521-5285 or robert.digitale@pressdemocrat.com. On Twitter @rdigit