Roy Knight Quotations

We're going to do our best to help meet these kids' educational needs while they're here in Texas. We want them to feel like they're a part of the Lufkin Panther family.

We're extremely fortunate that we have such a caring community,

We've been in contact with the commissioner of education and at this point in time, she has given us permission to waive all days that we missed because of our current circumstance. What we anticipated would happen in Houston instead has happened in Lufkin, Texas, so at this point, we're not required to use our weather days. We still have cold weather coming and we might have to use those at that point in time.

We didn't want to find ourselves in the middle of a large-scale evacuation and not have any lead time to warn parents if we had to close.

Lufkin is a hub, so they told us they were sending MREs (meals ready to eat). But in the meantime, people are hungry. And our people are worn slap out,

maxed out. We're drowning, and we need some relief.

We expect to have about 100 new students by day's end,

Parents are always grateful when they know their kids are getting treated right.

I think our moms and dads were ready to get back in the routine, and the kids were just great they seemed delighted to be back.

We made it clear we need to get our schools ready to resume classes.

We're not expecting all of them to stay forever, but whether they're here two days, two months or longer, we'll do our best to make them feel welcome.

We'll spend the next two or three days rearranging our campuses - cleaning, disinfecting, making them safe for our kids and expect to start school Monday. No one is required to come to school - not teaching staff or otherwise; they need to tend to their own family needs at this point in time.

The parents I've talked to really appreciate how LISD employees treat their kids,

We're going to try to help these kids have as normal a school setting as possible,

Even for high school students we expect some degree of forgiveness particularly for those students that have only been here a short period of time whether it's Katrina or Rita. We expect less forgiveness for out Texas students who have been in our Texas system all along.

After consulting with the city's emergency management officials, we decided to cancel school at all of our campuses (today) and Friday,

It was a real team effort throughout Lufkin and Angelina County.