Photo courtesy DISD

School officials provided this photo of the inside of the school showing how the auditorium's entire suspended ceiling detached and fell to the ground.

CEILING COLLAPSE

Cynthia Vega reports

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DALLAS — More than 700 Louise Wolff Kahn Elementary School students were bused to a different campus Thursday morning after the auditorium's ceiling collapsed Wednesday afternoon.

With the building's safety in question, school and district officials asked parents to drop their kids off at the school, which where Pre-K and first-graders were bused to Rosemont Primary School and students in second through fifth grades were transported to to Rosemont Elementary.

"Obviously it is a strain when you have an additional 400 students who come on to a campus," said Dallas ISD spokesman Jon Dahlander. "We're going to do the best that we can."

Investigators initially thought an electrical fire set off the sprinkler system at Kahn; the weight of the water, in turn, led to the ceiling's collapse. But that theory is under review.

What is known is that the auditorium's entire suspended tile ceiling assembly — frame and all — plummeted to the ground.

"There were some students in there up until about 10 minutes before this happened," Dahlander said. "We're just fortunate that this wasn't worse."

The Kahn campus will remain closed to students until structural engineers can pinpoint the cause of the ceiling collapse and check the entire school building for any potential problem areas. Tentative plans are for students to return next Monday.

E-mail mdiaz@wfaa.com and cvega@wfaa.com