After a Monday without running water for the restrooms and kitchen at Stilson Elementary School, contractor Y-Delta successfully replaced the burst water supply tank and restored service in time for a normal school day Tuesday – normal for fall semester 2020, anyway.

“As of 4:40 this afternoon, full water service was restored, so everything will resume as normal tomorrow,” Bulloch County Schools Public Relations Director Hayley Greene said about 20 minutes later.

Stilson Elementary is served by a deep well. A Bulloch County Sheriff’s Office deputy on patrol Sunday morning had noticed water flowing from the pump house and alerted the school district’s maintenance department. Then the school district began planning repair and putting its contingency plans for water outages in place, Greene had explained earlier in the day.

The previous water tank had split along a seam, as seen in a photo she provided.

Sunday afternoon, the school district sent out emergency notices by email, phone, text messaging and through social media and news media. The notice gave SES parents and guardians the option of switching to at-home virtual learning, potentially for the entire week, since school staff members didn’t know how long the repairs might take.

But the families of just 27 students took the distance-learning offer, while most of Stilson’s 308 face-to-face students came to school in-person despite inconveniences. A survey link was sent with the notices, and 60% of these SES students families’ responded, Greene said. SES has 425 students, but the rest are participating virtually from home, anyway.

Emergency measures

The school system dispatched its truck with a big water tank to Stilson. Maintenance employees then filled 5-gallon buckets with water to be poured into toilets to flush them.  Custodians monitored the restrooms for this purpose, Greene said.

Since the cafeteria was also without water, Stilson school food service employees went to Southeast Bulloch High School, where they prepared sack lunches and brought them back for the students at SES.

Water fountains were not actually an issue, since the kind that kind that children would drink from directly have been shut off at all Bulloch County Schools campuses throughout this semester as a COVID-19 precaution. Bottled water was available to students Monday as usual, and students were allowed to bring clear water bottles from home.

But gallon jugs of water were sent to the classrooms for children to wash their hands with after first using hand sanitizer, which was available in the restrooms, she said.

Times were announced for families to pick up Chromebook laptops for any temporary distance-learning students who did not already have them, or packets of printed study materials.

But those measures became moot for the rest of the week when the new tank was installed and the water supply restored in one day.

“We expect face-to-face students to return to school Tuesday,” Greene said.