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She's Denise Neal, and today, she told us what she found when she arrived on the school compound:

Daniel Ortiz reporting
Yesterday, when the Principal, Denise Neal, locked up her office, she thought that tomorrow would be just another day at work.

That all changed last night when she got a call that her office was on fire.

Denise Neal - Principal, Ladyville RC School
"Monday evening was a regular evening, I locked up the office, there was nothing suspicious and I left from my home in the city and at around 10:45pm last night I got a call from a police officer stating that I need to come and bring the office keys because my office was on fire. On the scene there were the fire fighters and police officers and my vice principal and I was very heartbroken at what I found. The fire was already extinguish, but what I saw in there wasn't pretty."

"We have a lot of important files; student files, teacher's files. We have a Ricoh machine that does all the photocopying for our students in terms of exams, in terms of when we need to get out important letters to parents - when we need to inform them of anything that is happening with the school, we use that machine to run off those letters. We had printers, desktop computers, laptops. Approximately I would round it off to about $30,000 in terms of what we had in there."

And according to the Principal, the fire investigators think that this was arson.

Denise Neal - Principal, Ladyville RC School
"According to what the fire fighters found in their investigation, they have ruled out any electrical wiring or anything of that sort. They have found it to be arson. They are stating that they use the windows pry it open and then we had our school flag close by and that was what they lit."

She tells us that she thinks that the person who started the fire did it out of malice, but she says that if the person was trying to hurt her they are mistaken. They have only hurt the children who depend on this school.

Denise Neal - Principal, Ladyville RC School
"At the moment it's still under investigation, but in my heart I am going to say that the person who did it know who they are, they know why they did it and I'm going to tell them that they're reason is not valid, it doesn't warrant something like this what they. If they're intentions was towards me and I don't see why, then they have not hurt me or bring me down in any way. They have taken away from the children of Ladyville community and its rather sad, because this school is a struggling school and there is so much that the school still needs and now we have to go back and do repairs to things that we already had. So it's the children at the end of the day who will suffer from something like this."

The Principal is hoping that members of the public will come forward and assist them in putting the office back together. All that equipment lost in the blaze is estimated at around $30,000 dollars and she says that the school can't afford to replace those items.

For the time being, she will set up office in the school's library, but that part of the school is less secure, so no expensive items will be stored there.