Principal apologizes after sending students home minutes into first school day

HENRICO COUNTY, Va. -- Freeman High School, located in the West End of Henrico County, closed Monday morning, just hours after it opened for the first day of classes.

A fast-moving storm knocked out power to thousands of people in Henrico on Sunday .

While most of those Dominion Energy customers have had their power restored, the outage continued to impact the high school.

"I apologize that this message is coming at the 11 ^th hour, but I was really hopeful that our repair crews, who have worked incredibly hard last night and all this morning, would have us up and running before students arrived," Freeman High School Principal John Marshall wrote in an email to parents. "With about half of the building without lights or air conditioning, and some of our emergency safeguards not at full capacity, we will need to wait until tomorrow to start this great year together."

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Students were dismissed at 9:30 with school buses returning students who ride the bus back home.

Later Monday, Principal Marshall announced power was restored and school would resume on Tuesday.

"I want to start with an apology to our community for the late notice of our changes today. This is not how I wanted our year to start, but I have to pass along how great your kids are. As they walked into classrooms without lights and AC, they still had smiles on their faces. As we pivoted on a dime and they had to navigate a hastily-planned dismissal, they did so admirably which made a tough morning more manageable for us. Our kids are great," he said in an email. "I want to personally thank you for the flexibility that we had to have in our community over the last 24 hours and acknowledge that getting your kids ready for the day, in some cases without power, only to have us send them right back, was a huge lift and a challenge. Thank you for navigating it with us."

Marshall also provided to timeline of events that led to the early dismissal:

"I believe deeply in transparency, so I wanted to share a run-down of what led to this morning’s decision," he wrote. "Throughout the night and this morning, we certainly wish that we could have seen into the future to have the information we needed to avoid late changes. We are reflecting on ways that could have prevented these late changes and welcome feedback as we always work to improve. Thank you for your patience and understanding."

• Last night after the storm , we did a full building inspection and were aware that there were some rooms without power and some flooding in our basement. We contacted Dominion Power and anticipated their support last night or early this morning.
  
• As I received updates from our facilities teams this morning starting very early, we were still hopeful that Dominion could get us up and running prior to student arrival.
  
• As students arrived on campus , we received word from Dominion that they did not have a timeline for a resolution to this issue.  51 of 100 classrooms were without lights or AC (plus both gyms) and several layers of our safety protocols were not at full strength.  Our teachers were ready to teach with these limitations, but due to the combination of safety concerns and the rising temperature in so many classrooms with no timeline for relief, sending students home became necessary.
  

• Around 9:20 , I informed our staff, students and community (via PA, email, and parent square phone call) of the need for an early dismissal. We worked with support from our central office transportation and safety teams to execute a dismissal in waves. Any students left on campus were supervised and cared for until their rides arrived.

  It was previously announced that the first day of at Maybeury Elementary School would be pushed back to Tuesday due to storm-related power outages .

This is a developing story. Email the CBS 6 Newsroom if you have additional information to share.

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