Leaks in roofs weighed down by rain and melting ice and snow led to closures at eight Halifax-area schools on Monday.

At J.L. Ilsley High School, there was outrage at the conditions students and staff found when they arrived in the morning.

“There’s buckets on tables. Students are holding buckets in classrooms. The ceilings are collapsing,” said student Emma Champagna-Ehler.

Word of state of the school spread, prompting Liberal MLA Brendan Maguire, who represents the area of the Spryfield, N.S. school, to go see for himself.

“There’s garbage cans filled with water. There’s tiles falling from the ceiling. There’s damage to the computers,” Maguire said.

“It’s a mess.”

Midway through the morning, students at J.L. Ilsley were sent home.

Parents of students there were furious about the conditions. 

“I think it’s disgusting,” said Deborah Harnish.

“They can fix Central Spryfield (Elementary School), but they want to keep the students down here, and I don’t think it’s proper,” she said.

Picking up his child on Monday, Mike Thomsen posed a question for school board members.

“Would you allow your kid to go through this?” Thomsen said.

“If it’s not safe for your child, how is it safe for anybody else’s?”

Maguire said he did confront members of the school board.

“I was disheartened and I was angry,” Maguire said.

“I may have had some choice words for reps there.”

Doug Hadley, a school board representative, says there is a section of roof that is being replaced, but that’s not the problem.

The issue is with a large section that was replaced about 15 years ago, Hadley said.

“We have to get to the bottom of why that is and then determine and see if there’s a warranty and see if that’s covered,” he said.

Hadley said it’s been a winter like no other.

“We have eight schools closed but we have perhaps 25 to 30 schools that have some type of leak,” he said.

Though the new section of roof isn’t leaking, contractor George McCarthy said weather and other restrictions are delaying its completion.

McCarthy said he has about 200 workers on rooftops of commercial buildings — not fixing them but trying to save them by clearing off snow.

“On a lot of these commercial buildings, we’re seeing 18 inches of solid ice. And then we got three or four feet of snow on top of that,” McCarthy said.

Meanwhile, in the Burnside industrial park, a 20,000 square-foot section of a building’s roof succumbed to the weight of ice and snow, and collapsed.

With files from CTV Atlantic’s Rick Grant