HOUSTON (AP) — Students in Houston on their first day of classes following city-wide flooding from Harvey were greeted Monday with hugs from teachers and staff, many coming from school secretary Demitra Cain.
The longtime school district employee said she had probably given out at least 200 hugs as she stood outside Codwell Elementary and greeted students and parents as they began the new school year, which was delayed by two weeks due to Harvey.
Students “are excited to be back. Parents are excited to get students out of the house, to get them back to something normal, to be with their friends,” Cain said.
Students at 202 of the Houston school district’s 284 campuses started classes on Monday. Houston has the nation’s seventh-largest school system, with about 215,000 students.
The remaining campuses will start classes on Sept. 18 and Sept. 25 due to ongoing clean up and repairs from Harvey, which last month dumped more than 50 inches of rain in some areas around Houston.
None of the district’s more than 300 schools and facilities escaped without some impact from the tropical storm, said Superintendent Richard Carranza. The district estimates Harvey caused at least $700 million in damage to schools and other buildings.
Nine campuses were so severely damaged that their students will have to be temporarily relocated to vacant district buildings or transferred to nearby schools and three of these campuses likely will be closed for repairs the entire school year. These nine campuses served about 6,500 students last year.
“We are working hard to make sure that we’re going to be as normal as normal can be, given the circumstance. We know the quicker we can get students into a routine, it allows mom and dad to get into a routine. It allows the healing to begin,” said Carranza after visiting with students at Codwell Elementary and helping serve some of them breakfast. “So we’ve burned the midnight oil for the last two weeks to make sure we can get as many schools up and running today.”
The district planned to pick up students who were still staying at shelters because their homes and apartments were flooded during Harvey and take them to campuses.
For students who didn’t start on Monday or who have been staying in shelters, teachers and community groups have been working with them to ensure they get organized instructional activity until they return to the classroom, Carranza said.
Chitiquita Myers, who dropped off her 9-year-old son James at Codwell Elementary, said the start of the new school year will give all her seven children a chance to focus on something good and forget about the fear they felt during the tropical storm. Myers said her home did not flood but her kids were scared and “slept in their closets” during the torrential rainfall.
“They’re doing good now. All night (Sunday) they were talking about going to school,” said Myers, 33.
Other school districts in the Houston area have also had to make adjustments due to damage from Harvey.
In the Houston suburb of Humble, Summer Creek High School will share its building for the entire school year with students from Kingwood High School, which was severely damaged. In the Katy school district, students at Creech Elementary will attend classes at an unused satellite location belonging to the University of Houston until repairs to their campus can be completed.
