George School to Reopen Thursday

UPDATED AT 5:25 p.m.

will reopen Thursday after having emergency closings for three days in a row.

The school was originally scheduled to have a delayed opening Wednesday, but it had to be closed all day because of lack of power. The rest of the district schools were open for full days.

Superintendent Geoffrey Zoeller sent out an alert Wednesday morning informing parents that PSE&G had to cut power to the area around the school.

"With no power, we have no choice but to close George School for today," he said.

Later in the afternoon, he sent out another notice that George School would reopen Thursday for a full day.

"All boiler and heating systems, fire protection systems and all other infrastructure systems are now fully restored," he said.

PSE&G reported Wednesday that power remained out to 37,000 total customers, but it had restored 91 percent of customers impacted. The utility expects to have more than 95 percent of its customers back online by Thursday. Overall, the utility said the storm impacted more than 571,000 customers.

Between one and 500 customers remained in the dark Wednesday in both Westwood and Washington Township, according to the PSE&G outage map.

Zoeller said George School has now used all emergency closings built into the calendar year and the other schools have just one remaining. He said he would be making recommended calendar changes for the 2011-2012 school year to the Board of Education at the next meeting, scheduled for Nov. 17.

"We sincerely appreciate everyone's support, understanding and flexibility as we work through this situation," Zoeller said.