BATESVILLE, Miss. — Generators powered trucks as crews worked to clean out what was left of Batesville Elementary School.
“I was very sad,” a 9-year-old boy said.
Sad was the only way some people could describe the way they felt when they saw the school burst into flames.
“It’s devastating. There’s not much left,” Stephanie Sanders told WREG.
The school district said the kindergarten wing was hit the hardest.
The school cafeteria, 17 classrooms and administrative offices were all burned to the ground.
“Just know that it affected a lot of people that have come through those doors — either as a parent, a student, a teacher,” Tim Wilder, Superintendent of the South Panola School District, said.
Superintendent Wilder and School Board members had an emergency meeting on Saturday.
“I was just able to give the School Board an assessment of the damages to the elementary school,” Wilder explained.
Despite all of this work that was going on at the school on Monday, the superintendent said they still planned on starting the school year off on time.
“My two daughters that were going to go to school here this year and now we’re kind of wondering where they`re going to go to school at now,” Sanders worried.
Wilder said it was all a matter of shuffling things around.
WREG was told the Pre-K and first grade students would remain at the main building at Batesville Elementary because it only suffered minor damages.
Kindergarten classes would go to Batesville Middle while 5th graders at that school would attend the Junior High School.
