NEWPORT — Students returned to Richards Elementary School Tuesday after a wildlife services business thoroughly inspected the building for signs of bats.

The school was closed Monday to allow the company to inspect the building, Newport School District Superintendent Donna Magoon said in a Monday afternoon phone interview.

Magoon ordered Monday’s inspection after a bat swooped down on a staff member last Thursday, the first day back for Richards students after the holiday break. While there were no children present when it happened, Magoon sought the inspection to determine how and where the bats were gaining access to the building. She sent out a notice to families of the school’s roughly 280 students in pre-kindergarten through fifth grade last Friday telling them about the closure.

“Being a superintendent now and knowing about it I have to do something about it,” Magoon said. “If someone ever got hurt it would not be OK. I would be devastated.”

Inspectors found that big brown bats have been making their way into the school, located at 21 School St., through gaps between pipes and small holes in drop ceilings. While Monday’s inspection did not find any bats, a previous inspection in December found hundreds of them in the school’s attic.

“To address this issue proactively, we will be contracting with someone to look for any signs of bat movement,” Magoon wrote in a Monday letter to families, adding that the inspections will take place every two weeks.

Additionally, staff have been working to patch all holes and cracks in the school’s drop ceilings. There are plans to install one-way doors in March right before the bats wake up from hibernating. That will allow the bats to leave the attic and not return.

After the bats are gone, the attic will be cleaned again.

A pest control company discovered the bats after staff reported respiratory issues in December, Magoon said.

At first, Magoon thought employees’ symptoms were related to seasonal colds or mold, and she ordered mold testing to be done at the school. The first round of tests came back negative.

“When that came back I thought: ‘Oh geez, what could it potentially be?’ ” Magoon said.

Then she remembered a conversation she had with a school employee last year about bats in the attic and did research about bat guano’s ties to respiratory infections.

In December, a pest control company discovered bats and bat droppings throughout the school’s attic, including piles of guano as deep as six inches. Magoon got in touch with New Hampshire Fish and Game officials who told her the bats were hibernating and could not be removed because doing so would kill them. The bats posed no danger to staff and students.

Over the holiday break, a wildlife services company removed the bat guano from the attic.

The Richards building was constructed in 1923, according to Newport property records. The original building was four stories tall and over the years there have been two-story additions added to it, Magoon said. The bats and bat guano were primarily found in the older, four-story portion of the building. That portion of the building includes classrooms for children in older grades and there are no plans to relocate those students at this time, Magoon said.

A report from this week’s inspection will be ready in a few weeks, Magoon wrote to families Tuesday, and it will be shared with the public.

“People are saying it’s just a bat, but bats carry rabies. If you work with young kids (you know) if they see a bat they’re going to try to touch it,” Magoon said.

She added that she had concerns if a child touched or was a bit by a bat, they’d be afraid to tell an adult because they’d be afraid of getting in trouble. “Next thing you know, you have a kid dying from rabies.”

School officials were following best practices by waiting until the bats are done hibernating before removing them, said Sandi Houghton, bat biologist at New Hampshire Fish and Game.

Big brown bats are one of the most common of New Hampshire’s eight bat species. Five of those species hibernate for the winter, usually from November through April. While most of them hibernate in caves and mines, the big brown bat is also known to hibernate in buildings.

Big brown bats — which are between 4½ and 5-inches tall but have wingspans of around a foot — are not endangered, but their numbers have been affected by white nose syndrome, a fungal infection that kills hibernating bats.

“There’s definitely a decline in their numbers,” Houghton said. While “we’ve seen some recovery” in big brown bats, their numbers are not what they used to be before white nose syndrome was first detected in New Hampshire in 2009.

Fish and Game receives a handful of calls a year regarding hibernating bats every year, Houghton said. Usually when someone calls it is about a single bat which makes the situation in Newport a bit unusual, Houghton said.

“The New Hampshire Department of Education (NHED) is aware of the situation at Richards Elementary School in Newport and has been in communication with its school leaders,” the New Hampshire Department of Education said in an emailed statement. “NHED will continue to correspond with school officials to ensure that students have a safe and healthy place to learn and that the bat infestation is adequately resolved.”

It is the second time this school year that a Newport school has closed because of an environmental issue: In November, the middle high school closed for a day due to an odor from the wastewater treatment plant.

Magoon said that she and Newport Town Manager Kyle Harris have discussed holding a forum in the spring to teach residents about the bats “because there’s going to be hundreds of bats that no longer have a home” and they might try to make their home elsewhere in the community. School officials are also discussing turning the experience into an educational opportunity where students and their families could build bat houses.

Liz Sauchelli can be reached at esauchelli@vnews.com or 603-727-3221.