North Atlanta High School sent students home early on Friday after a water outage left the building without working bathrooms, forcing administrators to cut the school day short with no clear timeline for when the water would come back on.
Principal Dr. Angela Mitchell said the outage traced back to a problem with the city water system, according to Atlanta News First. She said the city’s watershed department was already working on the issue, but as of Friday afternoon there was no estimated repair time.
Bathrooms Out, Classes Cut Short
The decision to dismiss students early came down to basic building function. Dr. Mitchell said the school simply could not operate without working bathrooms, the outlet’s report notes, leaving administrators little choice but to end the day ahead of schedule.
While the water system problem persisted, the school distributed bottled water to students and staff, per the same account. Meanwhile, the district worked to arrange bus routes to get students home safely despite the disruption to the normal schedule.
Not the First Water Trouble at North Atlanta High
This is not the first time North Atlanta High School has dealt with a water-related shutdown. A prior incident involving a broken water main left nearly 2,000 students at the school without water throughout a Monday, according to The Atlanta Journal-Constitution. That earlier outage was resolved by the following Tuesday, when water was restored to the main classroom building, and classes resumed normally on Wednesday.
It remains unclear whether Friday’s outage is connected to that earlier water-main break, and no details have surfaced on the exact cause or location of the current city water system problem. For now, families are left waiting alongside the school for word from the watershed department on when service will be fully restored.
