SPENCER, IN — Owen County Schools Superintendent Dale Henneker confirmed Friday afternoon that all six district buildings will be closed Tuesday regardless of the outcome of Monday night’s College Football Playoff Championship, citing ‘a realistic assessment of who would actually show up.’
The decision came after a brief Thursday-evening conference call among district administrators that lasted approximately eleven minutes, nine of which Henneker later said were spent confirming that nobody on the line disagreed. The closure, he clarified in a follow-up note to parents, is not a celebration day, nor a mourning day. ‘It’s a day,’ he wrote. ‘We are not assigning it a mood.’
Brenda Yost, who has worked the morning shift at the Casey’s General Store on State Road 46 for nineteen years, said the move tracked with what she’d been hearing since Friday. ‘Half my regulars told me they were calling in sick Tuesday anyway,’ Yost said, refilling a coffee carafe with the patience of someone who has watched this town react to a lot of things. ‘The other half retired in November.’
By Sunday evening, First Farmers Bank, Spencer Family Dental, and the Owen County Recorder’s office had all posted handwritten notices indicating they would likewise be closed Tuesday. The Dollar General, reached for comment, said it was a corporate matter and they would ‘see what Monday looks like.’
Rev. Marlene Tuggle, of First Methodist, moved Monday’s MLK Day community breakfast up to 7 a.m. — an hour earlier than usual — so that the forty-three attendees could, in her words, ‘observe, eat, and still get to the television.’ Tuggle, who is a Purdue graduate, declined to say where she planned to be at kickoff.
Tanner Beech, an eighth grader at Owen Valley Middle, said he supported the closure on principle. ‘Either we win and nobody’s doing math,’ Beech said outside the Spencer Public Library, ‘or we lose and nobody should be doing math.’
One school board member, Curtis Diggins, abstained from the informal Thursday agreement, telling Henneker that the closure ‘sets a precedent.’ Henneker reportedly responded that Diggins was correct, and that the precedent had been set in 1987, when the boys’ basketball team made it to semi-state and nobody bothered showing up to first period the morning after.
The Spencer Volunteer Fire Department has voted to remain on call. A duty captain reached Sunday night noted that fires, unlike Tuesdays, are not optional, though he conceded the truck bay television would ‘be on, obviously.’
As of Sunday evening, the only Owen County institution publicly committed to operating a full Tuesday schedule was the Spencer post office, which is federal, and which a clerk acknowledged would ‘technically be open’ — in the same tone people use to describe a distant cousin.