The Destruction and Re-Birth of a School Family: An Account of The Kingwood High School Experience with Hurricane Harvey

We entered a dark hallway filled with shadowy figures we did not know and trudged through raw sewage shimmer, dead fish, and snakes.?Assault on the senses was all around. The sound of generators and shop-vacs was deafening, distant yelling echoed and, while I cannot smell, others fought off gag reflexes from the smell of rot, decay, and feces.?The air was thick, humid, cut-able with a knife, and tasted like copper from corroding wiring.?It did not help that the summer heat tipped the scales at 100 degrees with 98% humidity.?As I weaved around a spaghetti bowl of tubes, wires, and debris, the dark figures in the hallway, some, friends for decades, did not speak because of the focus on the task at hand.?Mine was to break down water swollen doorways with my sledge-hammer in the hopes that we could retrieve precious records, files, uniforms, instruments, and equipment.?As I destroyed 50 doors and broke into offices, the obedient, rule following teacher in me cried out “I have been the boundary keeper and protector of our schools for 29 years, how will I come to terms with sullying that tradition?!’ ?Yes, this was a sample of our school on August 29, 2017.?Kingwood High School in Humble, Texas, and our journey to recovery was just beginning.?Our leadership challenge began with an exploration to discover the gravity our school’s destruction. ????

Discovery

Our leadership team was allowed to enter the second floor of our building at 9 AM to survey damage on Wednesday, August 30.?I had been in the Fine Arts section of the building on the first floor breaking down doors the day before. We soon found 100 academic classrooms with teacher property and instructional materials, 4 office suites, the kitchen, cafeteria, Career and Technology classrooms, 2 Computer labs, Art rooms, Textbook storage, 2 Gyms, 1 pool, Athletics, Coaches offices, Sports fields, Band, Choir, Orchestra, Theater, Set design shops, Main Offices, Nurse offices and Special Education classrooms and offices were destroyed.?All student cumulative files, transcripts, medical files, special education files, financial records, and 20,000 textbooks had turned to mush or swelled beyond use.?200 Band, 200 Choir, 200 Orchestra and 200 Theater costumes and uniforms were submerged.?Every band, choir, and orchestra instrument along with 2 million pages of music was liquidated.?Every sports’ and dance uniform and equipment were soiled beyond use.?Both gym floors had floated and resembled giant ruptured boils.?The natatorium was a cesspool of green water topped by a scab of brown film with living and dead fish underneath.?Every practice field and court were defiled and contaminated with raw sewage and one dead deer.?All 12, massive air handling HVAC units, electrical wiring conduit, data line, and plumbing system was inundated and defunct.?Every trophy, State Championship plaque, medal, team and student portrait was obliterated.?All third and fourth floor teacher property and instructional material was molding by the hour.?Every stick of furniture was contaminated and unusable.?It was now 11 AM and school was going to start in two weeks!?We left in a stupor, as if zombies walking through a literal apocalypse.?Some hours later we met to discuss our course of action, the first of which was helping 10 flooded staff families, communicating with student families and then moving out of the building as fast as possible.?Thankfully, our district leadership had the foresight to notify FEMA two days before.

Moving out?

As you might imagine, our 220 faculty members longed to salvage what they could of their personal items and instructional material post haste.?Each of us, 6 Assistant Principals, 1 Associate Principal and 1 Principal were now receiving frantic messages from dozens of faculty members seeking guidance.?As I mentioned above, the campus was a very hazardous place with thick acrid air, sewage infused floors, and hundreds of tripping hazards.?We threw caution to the wind and established an evacuation process for faculty and staff on Thursday August 31 and Friday September 1.?Teachers were allowed into the dark abyss with no AC or light in 100 degree heat in groups of 10 for one hour over the course of two days.?We established a sign in and out post to ensure that no teacher went in but did not come out.?On two occasions, we frantically went back into the building to search for teachers who did not check out after 90 minutes.?Through my mind’s eye, I saw our dignified faculty reduced to a band of gypsies, rolling their belongings in shopping carts, rolling chairs, and Lil’ Red wagons.?Yet, they grabbed what they could, dripping with sweat, covered in dust and mud in hopes to start teaching in 10 days.?To add insult to injury, some of us had been hit by looters and personal displays used to engage with students were stolen.?All the while, in shadowy, dank hallways, crews who dodged frantic teachers were busily mucking out. ??????

Mucking out

This is an unsavory process of shoveling soiled hay, debris and excrement from an animal stall.?In construction terms it politely means that crews evacuate water, soggy debris, toxic chemicals and sewage from a salvageable building.?After the first and second floors of Kingwood High were submerged under 6 feet of river water for 2 days, this process would take two months.?The strange spaghetti bowl of tubing on the floor that I mentioned above would writhe on the floor as if a nest of vipers under the suction pressure used to evacuate thousands of gallons of sewage and river water from hallways, classrooms and offices.?These serpentine suction tubes disgorged themselves into countless storage trucks to be emptied elsewhere.?Some days after the suction was complete, hundreds of feet of inflatable ventilation shafts were hung at head level to blow filtered, dry air into the environment in order to dry out 200,000 square feet of soaked floor space.?Temporary lighting was then installed and by September 8, all sheet rock was removed.?Because the mucking process agitated vast amounts of dust, the campus was ruled off limits and hazardous to all personnel except supervisory district personnel.?I was part of that team whose mission was to advise work crews who boxed up 2,000 boxes of files and remaining personal and teaching materials from the first and second floors.?Salvageable classroom articles and boxes were placed in 8, 60 foot storage containers in the faculty parking lot.?1,400 boxes of paper files were taken to a massive storage facility to be freeze dried in an attempt to salvage them.?As I walked out of the building on Saturday, September 2, I looked back through the skeletal walls of 100 classrooms and restrooms, 200 yards into the main office and thought, “where will we go?”???????????????

Displacement

“Where will we go?” was being decided at the central office level while we were shepherding teachers through the labyrinth to salvage their belongings.?Two human options and three building options where on the table.?Human options were to disband the school and distribute 200 teachers and 2760 students equally between three other campuses or remain whole and share a campus.?Options for the building were:?1. level it and start over which would take two to three years and 200 million dollars.?2.??remove the first floor, some parts of which were below the flood plain and make the second floor the new entrance which would take two years and 100 million dollars.?3.?Put it back like it was with some renovations and get the students back in the building as soon as possible.?This could possibly be done by March 2018 and would end up costing about 80 million dollars. I could write a book on the decision process but, in two days we had our decision.?Disbanding a large, 3000-member family would never do.?Our community voiced their strong desire to keep teachers and students together and get back to normalcy as soon as possible.?This meant that option 1 and 2 would also never do. Therefore, it was decided that we would be displaced in our entirety to a large, newer campus 12 miles away in the Southern part of the district.?School would start on September 11, in eight days!?Our leadership team would meet with our new savior campus counter-parts at Summer Creek High School, on Monday, September 4 to figure out how to operate.???

School Operations

In this phase of the experience, we were allowed to get creative.?We met with our administrative counter-parts, Principal, Associate, Assistants, and Counselors on our new campus across the district to design campus operations.?Meanwhile, our Instructional Coaches met with their doppelgangers to hash out curriculum.??Our tasks were simple:?Create systems, processes, and curriculum for two comprehensive, 6A high schools to function on ONE campus.?Our teams were given two days to design and submit, and one day for the decision to run up the chain of command.?A combined faculty meeting would occur on day 4, Thursday September 7th with work days Friday through Sunday.?Students would start on Monday, September 11.?We tossed around several ideas such as each organization having 2 1/2 days per week, one organization would have the week, the other the weekend, every other day, night school-day school and morning school-afternoon school.?After two days of deliberation we proposed that Summer Creek High would run from 6-11, and Kingwood High would run from 12 -5, both, Monday through Friday.?SCHS would offer breakfast each day from 530 to 600 and KHS would offer lunch from 1130 to 1200.?11-1130 would be transition time for each campus.?SCHS Athletics and Fine Arts Programs would practice in the afternoons with KHS having the mornings.?Both leadership teams came to the mutual philosophical agreement that during the allotted times, each organization would own the campus.?Class periods 1, 2, 4, and 5 would meet on Monday, Wednesday and Friday for 60 minutes.?Periods 3, 6, and 7 would meet on Tuesday and Thursday for 84 minutes.?Both campuses kept their master schedule in-tact and KHS simply changed room numbers to fit our new campus. ??KHS teacher hours were 9-5 and SCHS 6-2.?During the transition time SCHS’s?500 cars and 30 buses exited to the West, while the same number of KHS vehicles entered from the East.?This was proposed to Assistant Superintendents on Tuesday and approved on Wednesday.?We were ready and launched the plan at the joint faculty meeting on Thursday.?On Saturday, we opened the campus to KHS parents and students to familiarize themselves with the building.?It seems simple on paper now but all of us were calm externally yet scared out of our wits and cotton-mouthed at the impending reality on Monday, September 11th.?We would not go home until March 19th.

Reality

The first day went almost seamlessly and our created systems worked amazing well.?Culturally, both organizations embraced the mutual challenges and both students and adults worked as if a family.?Without Summer Creek opening their arms, our organization would have evaporated, dispersed to multiple campuses, ceased to exist.?It took our faculty and staff three weeks to find their way around the giant campus, adjust to the schedule, establish their teaching methodologies, structure their classes, and simply get their classroom physically organized.?This euphoric start slowly settled into an uncomfortable reality.?Ninety-five percent of our faculty enjoyed a worry-free, 2-10-minute commute both ways, pre-Harvey.?This flipped to a 45-60-minute, white knuckle, rush hour battle while at SCHS.?This took a toll on our faculty and we lost 5 teachers within the first two weeks to family support and logistical crisis.?As a personal testament, this stressor compounded by others, set me on a path towards depression which I did not realize until it was over.?It was not until we commiserated after the fact as work-family members that I was relieved to know I was not alone.

While we anticipated most of the challenges, bus transportation of 1,500 students to a central neighborhood drop-off point from school was our greatest nemesis.?While on our home campus we ran 7 buses with a travel time of 15 minutes and 2-6 miles.?At SCHS we ran 30 buses at a distance of 12-15 miles through rush hour traffic.?This equated to kids being on the bus for 1 ? to 2 hours every day through October.?Most of the ride was unsupervised time with some of it in the dark.?If you are an educator reading this, you know that this is a recipe for trouble.?If you are not an educator and you are reading this, you also know that this is a recipe for trouble.?We immediately experienced a spike in very disruptive behaviors.?These, in turn, led to many collateral problems across campus and in the community.?In order to alleviate these challenges, we posted an administrator at the departure location in the morning and at the drop-off location in the afternoon with radio communication to all drivers.?Yet, much of the problem was out of our control except shortening the bus launch time from campus.?This went from almost an hour the first three weeks to about 30 minutes subsequently.?As bus drivers figured out traffic patterns, the travel time went down to 45 minutes.?In spite of these improvements, we continued to see increased disruptive bus behavior.?????

The glaring problem of shortened instructional minutes became impactful very quickly.?If you were a student and you met your 3, 6, and 7th period classes on Thursday, it would be 4 days before you met these classes again.?This would be a challenge for any person.?We alleviated this as best we could by offering open tutoring every day with every teacher from 1100 to the 1200 start time, after school, and remotely.?Additionally, we established an unspoken norm of reduced rigor and accountability and empowered our teachers to do what was needed to get students through the dark times.?TEKs were strategically addressed, some at a very superficial level, and some were omitted.?Because many teachers shared a room with their SCHS counterpart, cross-campus collaboration and academic support occurred at previously unimagined levels.?State testing performance suffered in English and Algebra but Science commended performance increased.?Inter-campus planning and collaboration increased due to the later start time which gave teachers a much needed time compensation to offset increasing student learning gaps.?Our pre-Harvey culture of rigorous academic tracking of students went out the window while behavioral and stress related interventions more than compensated. ??Our leadership consciously decided to track student attendance only when it became an outlier compared to existing norms.

You might say to yourself at this point “is that it?”.?The detailed list of challenges would comprise a tome of information for which I do not have the room here.?However, as we look back at the challenges faced and overcome, we successfully navigated a ruptured norm and successfully educated students under duress in an unfamiliar building.?And, while all 220 adults endured personal challenges and the organization suffered trauma, the overall experience was positive and built in each of us a tough, weathered set of armor. ????????

Re-build

With the SCHS-KHS ballet commenced, our campus was being completely gutted and rebuilt.?While the massive project had its share of construction and contracting managers, an educational representative needed to be infused with the process.?I was that person.?In October, I split my administrative duties at SCHS with construction manager duties on the KHS campus.?The first huge task was to determine what furniture was in every flooded classroom, closet, office, and store room.?Having never done this before, and with no established protocols, I went to the source.?Over the course of one week I interviewed 120 faculty and staff to piece together furniture that had been accumulating for 15 years.?In fact, this process was extremely fun.?I got to make people happy and rebuild the school.?I submitted a 120 page purchase order for $2 million two weeks later.?Delivery of 15 semi-trailers of furniture was set for February 2018.?By mid-October, the mucking out process out was finished and the campus was in drying status.?The next task was to determine all flooring types for 200,000 square feet of flooring, paint color and type, wall textiles, and new additions.?This process was accomplished by the end of October.?In the first of many architectural meetings starting in November I proposed a major security upgrade to our entrance foyer.?As a sobering sign of the times, we needed an intruder hardened, bullet resistant main entrance.?The new foyer would incorporate a bullet proof reception vestibule, bullet resistant external windows, auto-locking exterior and interior doors, police panic buttons, and a few decorative upgrades.?This was an “ah ha” moment for all parties involved and the district then moved forward with vestibule upgrades in all schools.

In November as I walked with contractors through the building, we found a locked room.?We were shocked to find hundreds of destroyed desk-top computers, projectors, scanners, televisions, and all other myriad of technology devises that had been piled into the room.?All of it was un-inventoried!?We had all forgotten about this gigantic teaching and functional element that had been destroyed.?But, as I investigated, much of it was missing.?Earlier I mentioned 8, 60 foot metal containers in the faculty parking lot.?After a week of searching for keys, we were able to unlock these “conexes”.?One was filled to the ceiling, front to back with hundreds more technology and electronic devises that the mucking out crews had stacked, wet, into these boxes.?Then came the realization that there were 7 more un-opened boxes.?These revealed multiple tons of school and teacher property that had also been stacked, wet, into the boxes.?They had been sitting in this condition for two months.?As best I can remember, these conexes somehow, became empty over the next few months.?The technology mystery was addressed by district personnel, most of which I did not see, but I know it was resolved because I am writing this article on a new computer.

And then we discovered the science store rooms.?In these four store rooms the mucking out crews had mix-mastered all chemicals into 12 50 gallon, yellow plastic, hazardous waste drums.?It reminded me of a “super-fund site”.?Then we discovered that approximately $60,000 of science equipment simply ceased to exist and no one could tell us what happened to it.?The crews had also stuffed 400 boxes with trophies, plaques, and other memorabilia that was stored in the main gym.?These items had to be dispersed somehow.?These three discoveries were additional distractions through November lasting almost to the day we returned.?In retrospect they were disastrous but as I write this, students are safely working in clean, well-equipped science classrooms, labs, and gyms. ?

Through the renovation process and restoration of furniture, technology, architecture, design, textile selection, and color schemes, and more, there was virtually no collaboration.?The deadline to return to the school was too short.?In almost every case, I was either given two choices for selection or I determined two options and was asked to make a decision on the spot or within 24 hours. This was both liberating, empowering, and terrifying.?After all, I was hoping to satisfy a customer base of 220 faculty and staff, 2,700 students, 5,000 parents, and the immediate community.?Except for textbooks.?I mention above that we lost 20,000 textbooks.?Two days before the flood, we finished stacking the last book of a new inventory of 1.3 million dollars in the book room on the first floor.?Every single book absorbed water, swelled to twice their size and the weight collapsed them into the cesspool.?Replacement of this inventory and evaluation of our educational and instructional needs required in depth collaboration with multiple parties.?This process took three weeks right up to Thanksgiving, 2017.

From Thanksgiving through January, we endured a ground hog day progression of grueling repetition.?Dispatch buses, follow buses to school through rush hour traffic, school operations, launch buses, rush hour traffic, receive buses, repeat.?Meanwhile, much to their credit, our heroes, the building contractors and district maintenance personnel frenetically renovated the building so that we could return after Spring Break on March 19th.??????????????

Return

The increasing number of short deadline decisions mandated that I move back onto the campus in February and set up shop with the building superintendent.?From an administrative efficacy standpoint, this proved to be a challenge.?Normal administrative responsibilities called from across town while construction management responsibilities urgently pressed in at KHS.?I finally called “uncle” on February 2 and thankfully, my leadership team, God bless them, took up the slack.?The second week of February, our mindset at KHS switched to returning the organization to this building.?The acceleration of materiel delivery increased exponentially as we entered 5 weeks to return day.?By February 9, the building was inhabitable except for HVAC, heating and air conditioning in other words.?13 units, each the size of a Suburban, had been submerged and 7 had been restored.?An extensive system of plastic, inflatable ventilation tubes, hundreds of feet long, the size of telephone poles, snaked through the building.?The 15 semi-truck loads of furniture were scheduled to arrive on February 26th as were 80 cafeteria tables totaling $136,000.?Through a very extensive, three week assembly line process, the last piece of furniture was placed the day before Spring break on March 8, 2018.?Although she was still damaged internally, Kingwood High School was ready to accept her people on March 26.?

But how would we get back??Every teacher and staff member had accumulated teaching supplies and personal property at Summer Creek during the previous 6 months.?Similar to the movie MASH, we had to bug out in the week before Spring Break but continue to conduct school operations.?So, back at the end of February, we ordered 1,400 boxes (5 per person) for teachers to pack up their belongings.?We hired a moving contractor and labeled the school with six colored zones.?The teachers put a corresponding colored label on their boxes and we then staged the boxes in two large meeting rooms.?This took one week and then the moving company came with two semis, loaded up the boxes, and moved them to our cafeteria.?Over the course of two days, while furniture was being assembled, they dodged the furniture workers and delivered each of the 1,400 boxes to teacher classrooms.?This massive movement included all band, choir, and orchestra instruments, SPED equipment, and several hundred other items.?Teachers were allowed to work in their classrooms over Spring Break so that by Monday, we would be ready to get back to normal. ??????

Normalcy

???????????We returned from our Odyssey on March 19, 2018.?The euphoria in our new building was palpable and especially significant to our seniors who, early on, voiced their desire to graduate from their home campus.?The dark pall of August was almost forgotten as was a 6 month nightmare.?Many faculty members testified to the same feeling, that, the long road to normalcy was as a distant memory.?Fast forward to Graduation and the exultation was not diminished in May.?We then set our sights on a new year knowing that the strong bonds of adversity far exceeded any challenge.?As I write this in December, the building is still healing and only yesterday did we discover that we forgot to install handicapped seating in the auditorium.?An additional reminder came to the fore last week in the form of the 1,400 boxes of paper files that I spoke of in the beginning.?These were stored in a cavernous “Indiana Jones-esq” warehouse to be forgotten.?As if a breaching white whale, their stained visage has now surfaced and we work through legal channels to determine their fate.?In retrospect, and as an over-arching theme, our faculty, staff, students, district, contractor, family, and community member resilience in the face of incredible odds has made us whole after our devastation, disappointment and displacement.???????

???????????I write this article in hopes that it will benefit my fellow Texas public educators and administrative teams.?The Harvey destruction experience tested our organizational capacity, community fabric, and relationships of all kinds.?The full and detailed story is so complex and involves so many organizations and individuals that I strive to do honor to their tireless efforts, commitment to our re-birth, and dedication to serving our beloved students.?Especially to the Summer Creek High School community, parents, students, faculty and staff.?They graciously took us in in our time of desperation and welcomed us with open arms, saving our organization from disbandment.?