PANAMA CITY — Parents started trickling in at about 9 a.m. to pick up Cedar Grove Elementary fourth graders who had loaded two buses three hours earlier for a field trip bound for a tour of the Capitol.
The buses turned around near Bristol, heading back to Bay County, after school officials learned shortly after 7 a.m. that schools would be closed throughout the school district.
Differing weather reports overnight into Wednesday morning didn’t allow school officials to determine whether schools should be closed Wednesday, said Superintendent Bill Husfelt.
“Always student safety,” he said. “But every time it rains, we’re not going to close schools.”
Buses and parents had already dropped off students at several elementary schools by the time the notice was circulated.
Students at several elementary schools crowded cafeterias waiting for pick up. Some school buses remained at the schools, expecting schools to be closed down sometime in the early morning.
Over 8-inches of rain fell at Northwest Florida Beaches International Airport by 9 a.m. Surrounding areas are thought to have experienced even heavier rainfall.
An emergency shelter was opened at Deane Bozeman School at about 10:30 a.m.
“What happened today was between about 6 and 7 a.m., more roads became impassable than we’ve seen in a long time,” Husfelt said. “It was all in a quick flood.”
Ugly grayish-brown clouds covered any sight of blue sky Wednesday morning as Cedar Grove’s school staff jogged to cars at the parent pick-up drop-off depot.
Two heavy-duty poncho clad staff members helped push 72-year-old Dwayne Brook’s truck into a parking space as he waited on his grandchild to return on the bus from the canceled trip to Tallahassee.
“My old truck never puts me down, but it put me down today,” he said, holding a short smile. “It’s just one of those things.”
He said he didn’t blame the superintendent for calling off the school day after it had started.
“I would’ve made the same decision they made; I would’ve gone on,” he said, noting his kindergarten grandchild had stayed at home due to the weather prior to learning schools were closed.
“We knew the storms were coming,” Brook added, still sitting in his truck. “But nobody expected all of this water.”
But Mark VanBike, who chaperoned the Cedar Grove field trip, said he expected a sound decision to be made sooner.
“If all the other schools [adjacent counties] were closed down, and they made that decision last night, it could have been a sooner decision today for Bay County schools,” he said.
Principals began calling the school district headquarters soon after school started, Husfelt said, with reports of power outages and flooding.
“The thing that put it over the top was, what we began to hear was that the flooding was going to continue throughout the day and the roads that were already flooded were going to get worse,” Husfelt said. “My worry was that we couldn’t get kids home.”
School officials will keep an eye on the weather to determine Thursday’s plans. However, Husfelt said, preliminarily, students at schools that have flooding and bus routes that have impassable roads are not expected to report for school.