After switching uniform companies this summer, the Vicksburg Catholic Schools will once again be on the hunt for a distributor.

Parker School Uniforms, the company VCS switched to for the 2017-18 school year, unexpectedly went out of business Thursday closing all of its stores nationwide including two in the Jackson metro area and laying off all its employees.

“Just a little shocked and disappointed because we just started with them last year,” Mary Alredge, the principal at St. Francis, said. “We had a diocesan meeting today (Friday) and we will be back at school on Tuesday and we will work it out and we will figure out what we are going to do from there.”

VCS made the switch to Parker this year for all its uniforms due to the higher quality of the material. Students at St. Francis and St. Aloysius were able to wear the new Parker uniforms or the old uniforms bought through Inka Uniform Company this school year, but the expectation was that starting in the fall of 2018 all students would be wearing Parker uniforms.

Now they will have to find a new company and make decisions about what uniforms can be worn going forward. Alredge said she talked to VCS’s representative with Parker Thursday and was told that employees were told Tuesday the company was closing and all employees would be terminated.

“We are in a transition year so we are using old uniforms and the new uniforms and it will be another transition year next year,” Alredge said. “We just are going to have to look for another uniform company and it is going to take a little bit. Hopefully we can find a company that has the same material and same styles and we can just go from there.”

Alredge said some parents might be relieved about Parker closing because they were marred by customer service issues throughout the year.

“They had lots of issues this year so we didn’t get the very best service we had hoped we would have,” Alredge said. “I guess that is part of why they are closing. We have had some issues. Some parents didn’t have any problems and we had other parents who had problems so just looking at the Facebook page some are relieved maybe.”

Katherine Wallace, whose daughter is a fifth grader at VCS, was one of the parents who had issues. She said she is out more than $200 due to unfilled orders.

“We’ve lost money. There were seven shirts I still haven’t received that I paid for and they are $30 a piece,” Wallace said. “We thought it was going to be a really good thing, but they were out of stock of every item almost so it was really frustrating for everyone including the staff at St. Francis.”

Jordan Amborn, who has one child in first grade and one in Montessori, said she didn’t have any issues and was happy with the uniforms they had received from Parker.

“I hated to hear it because the uniforms we received from Parker this year have been good and good quality,” Amborn said. “I think that is why VCS chose them in the first place. They are a reputable company that has been around for years. The quality is so great so I hate this situation happened because it is so out of the control of the administration.”