Marlinton Elementary School students finally returned to school Monday after a three-week break only to be turned around and sent back home.

The school experienced an electrical issue which led to a heat outage.

"We're going to have to replace some pumps that were burned up because of the power outage and we do have one water line that has to be repaired in the PE room," Associate Superintendent for Operations Alice Irvine said at the board meeting Monday night. "We got the heat on around 11 a.m. today and the building's fine right now."

Irvine added that they had parts over-nighted and borrowed some supplies from the National Radio Astronomy Observatory in Green Bank to get the heat back in working order.

Making lemonade out of lemons, Superintendent Dr. J. Patrick Law said the MES teachers who were at school were sent to the middle school for training.

"We asked them to go to Marlinton Middle School where we had a trainer doing techSteps training for our teachers," he said. "It worked out well because they were already scheduled [for training] for Wednesday."

Students returned to school on Tuesday to a building with heat and a water leak.

"There is heat in all but six rooms and we got the water leak stopped," Principal Ron Hall said Tuesday morning. "The heating lines burst because we lost power, but we're working on it and the students are all in rooms with plenty of heat. The hallways, a few classrooms and the office have water in them, but the water leak has been fixed."

Maintenance crews worked in rooms without heat during the school day.