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Roanoke school officials have known about a rat problem at Fairview Elementary School since at least 1999 but did not launch a large-scale eradication effort until this week, possibly aggravating the problem, documents from the school system show.

Although teachers and staff at Fairview had complained repeatedly to administrators about the rats, it wasn't until tipsters contacted the Virginia Department of Health that the extent of the problem came to light.

In response, new Superintendent Rita Bishop decided six days before the start of school to temporarily move Fairview students, teachers and staff to classroom trailers on the campus of Preston Park Primary School while exterminators get rid of the rats.

The documents, which were obtained Wednesday evening through the Freedom of Information Act, also reveal that cafeterias throughout the school system reported rats last year. Fallon Park Elementary, Lincoln Terrace Elementary, Preston Park Primary, William Ruffner Middle and William Fleming High schools all found evidence of rats in their school cafeterias last year, according to a memo from Chief Financial Officer William Wingfield.

More recently, on Aug. 30, school staff found rat droppings in the Raleigh Court Elementary cafeteria. They also found droppings and a dead rat in the cafeteria of the Preston Park modular campus, where Fairview's students are being temporarily housed.

Deputy Superintendent for Operations Curt Baker, who has been on the job about a month, said exterminators are inspecting all schools in the system for rats.

"If there are any other issues in the district, we're going to be proactive," he said. "We're going to find them and we're going to deal with them."

Fairview students should be able to return to their home building in about a month, he said.

Top school administrators have been reluctant to blame their predecessors for the lapses. They said they prefer to focus on giving Fairview students a place to go to school.

"We're going to find out" what happened, Baker said. "First off, we needed to get [the] school open."

According to the documents, Warren Crawford, the school's late principal, received a letter in March 1999 complaining about rats at the school.

Crawford wrote back that the problem was being dealt with.

It's unclear how successful the school's efforts were.

Seven years later, in June 2006, Principal Julie Bush wrote a memo to the school system's central administration warning of a "steady increase in the number of sightings of rats in our building."

"One rat ran across a room during SOL testing," she wrote.

Six months after that, in December, Bush told Mac Westland, the school system's safety coordinator, that the problem had not gone away.

One teacher found 14 bottles of glue "with the tops eaten off of them," Westland wrote in a memo.

School officials set out baited traps whenever they heard about rats, but appeared not to grasp the severity of the problem until the health department received two anonymous tips this summer.

Health inspectors forwarded the first tip, on July 11, to the school system, according to the complaint report. Gary Willard, director of school plants, toured Fairview and told inspectors he found no evidence of rats.

A few weeks later, health inspectors got another complaint. This time, two inspectors toured the school.

"We saw droppings and evidence of rats, also several dead rats had been recovered from the ceiling," the inspectors wrote.

Health inspectors had performed regular checks of the school's cafeteria over the past couple of years and found nothing seriously amiss. But last week inspectors returned to the cafeteria, and this time found many droppings under cooking equipment.

Robert Parker, a spokesman for the health department, said he couldn't explain why inspectors found so many rat droppings last week and none before that.

"Either it wasn't there or it wasn't noticed," he said.

It's not unusual for inspectors to miss evidence of rats, especially if the building is cleaned regularly, said Bob Corrigan, an urban rodentologist who has advised New York City on how to deal with rat problems.

"An inspector is not going to go around disassembling the walls," he said.

The school system had a contract with National Exterminators to regularly inspect the schools, but Baker wrote the company last week canceling the contract.

The school system hired another company, Orkin Pest Control, to inspect all the schools again.

Baker vowed to move quickly to fix any new problem.

"We will not open a school that is unsafe for our children," he said.

Joshua Stegall, marketing director for National Exterminators, wrote back to Baker that no one had told the company of problems at Fairview and that the school had not taken its advice to fix structural flaws.

National Exterminators was fined $4,500 last year after a technician injected a pesticide into the wall of a classroom at Franklin County's Dudley Elementary School while students were at lunch.