The Cullman County School System suffered millions of dollars of damage in Monday night’s storm, with Welti Elementary, the county bus shop and several vehicles receiving major damage from the hail.

The Cullman County School Board held a special meeting Thursday afternoon to declare an emergency situation to make sure the repair process moves quickly.

Cullman County Schools Superintendent Shane Barnette said Welti had damage to the sides of the school along with the gutters and awnings, and will need the roof replaced, and several other buildings on the campus will also need roof repairs.

While the school was damaged by the storms, operations at Welti are proceeding as usual after students returned to school Wednesday, said Principal Principal Gina Webb.

There were several children who had their families displaced by the storm or had their family vehicles destroyed, so the Welti teachers and staff have been working to make sure the students still have a consistent school experience, she said. 

“We’re just really, really trying to maintain normalcy so the kids can regroup and have a normal routine,” Webb said. 

The repairs to Welti will likely cost several hundred thousand dollars, and damage to the roof of the system’s bus shop and its vehicles will put the total cost of the damage in the millions, Barnette said.

The shop will need its roof replaced, and there were also 13 buses damaged, along with three totaled driver’s education cars and a truck that is likely totaled, Barnette said.

One of the buses was already waiting to be repaired from an earlier incident, and it is likely the only bus that is totaled, he said.

The County School System has close to 130 buses in total, and every high school always has a few spares, so routes were not affected by the damage to the buses, Barnette said.

“We were able to find spare buses at different places,” he said.

Barnette credited the system’s transportation department for making sure that students were able to return to school Wednesday morning.

“They came right in early that next morning and started working on them,” he said. “We had some spare windows and things like that, and they went to changing out glass.”

Cullman County has also received an outpouring of support from neighboring school districts and transportation departments, and even the bus company itself, who all said they were willing to loan vehicles out if needed, Barnette said. 

Thanks to the effort of the county’s staff, students were able to get back to their regular routines after missing only one day, he added. 

“It’s really truly a miracle that we were able to go back to school the next day,” Barnette said. “I felt like the faster we were able to get back to some kind of normalcy, the better off we would be.”