Districts slowly recover from Sandy |
On Board Online • November 19, 2012
By Cathy Woodruff
Senior writer
At least 100 Long Island schools were damaged when Superstorm Sandy roared ashore overnight on Oct. 29, including about 10 that will need major renovations because of deep saltwater flooding, according to a State Education Department official who toured the region with local school leaders.
“It was painful to see,” said Assistant Commissioner Chuck Szuberla, recalling a flooded middle school where new library books had just been placed on shelves in preparation for a ribbon-cutting.
No one has yet tried to put a price tag on the school recovery costs. But Nassau BOCES District Superintendent Thomas Rogers expects it will easily reach into the tens of millions of dollars.
“There is not a school district on Long Island that has come out of this unscathed,” Nassau Suffolk School Boards Association Lorriane Deller told On Board on Nov. 8, while she was bundled against the cold in an office that remained without heat.
At least 358 districts across the state closed some or all of their schools for at least a day after Sandy hit, according to the State Education Department. Closings at dozens of districts on Long Island extended for more than a week, and several that had opened were forced to close again on Nov. 8 because of snow and ice dropped by a Nor’easter.
Students whose families lost homes have been hard to locate. Some are in shelters, some are staying with friends or relatives and some are in hotels. Some parents have taken advantage of their rights under the McKinney-Vento Homeless Education Assistance Act and enrolled their children in other schools.
As schools reopen, one task will be to make transportation arrangements to get students back to their home schools or enroll them in new ones.
“Student dislocation may be either a short-term issue or one that continues for a while as families strive to find either temporary or permanent new housing,” Deller said.
Recovery from wind damage has progressed well and is nearly complete on Long Island’s North Shore, Rogers said. But on the South Shore, flood damage may keep some school buildings out of action for months. Roughly a dozen schools in Nassau County, alone, sustained significant damage, and more, including Fire Island and Lindenhurst, were seriously damaged in Suffolk County to the east, he said.
Getting school operations up and running again has called for plenty of ingenuity and flexibility.
Some districts have been able to conduct classes in extra schools or classrooms in neighboring districts. East Rockaway is looking to relocate its high school for as long as it takes to repair extensive damage; Long Beach and Island Park are compressing classes into buildings that remain useable.
Pre-school and elementary students evacuated from Fire Island have been attending classes in vacant space available in an elementary school in Shirley, about 30 minutes away, using materials salvaged by their teachers and school staff as the storm approached.
Administrative offices for the Island Park, Long Beach and East Rockaway districts are being housed at the Nassau BOCES campus in Garden City. BOCES staff members have voluntarily stepped in on weekends to help with cleanup in district schools, and the cafeteria staff came in on a day off to prepare meals for school district staff gathered for an administrative meeting.
“We had some people saying it was the first hot meal they‘d had in days,” Rogers said.
Several South Shore districts are renting temporary space for classes and operations and running generators. They will need to replace flood-damaged instructional materials, band instruments and equipment. They will have to gut and rehabilitate buildings, including electrical and mechanical infrastructure.
“I think we are just going to have piles of unforeseen costs that are going to run straight up against the tax cap,” Rogers said.
Aside from damage to buildings, districts have been plagued by other obstacles to reopening in the wake of the storm. Gasoline shortages and public transportation shutdowns made it difficult or impossible for teachers and other staff members to get to work, and disruptions in cell and landline telephone service and Internet connections stifled communication.
In addition to Nassau and Suffolk on Long Island, the counties hardest hit by Sandy were Westchester, Rockland, Orange, Putnam, Sullivan and Ulster, along with the five boroughs of New York City.
The news of Sandy’s impact sounded achingly familiar to students, teachers and staff in rural upstate communities that were walloped just over a year ago by Tropical Strom Irene, which was followed by destructive remnants of Tropical Storm Lee.
“Our students realize what these communities are going through,” said Schoharie Superintendent Brian D. Sherman.
After Irene, Schoharie Central, which sits atop a hill, was only closed for 3 ½ days, Sherman recalled. But the school community still was rocked by damage beyond the campus.
“We had 147 families that lost their homes,” he said. “70 percent of the village was underwater.”
Sherman predicted that the emotional toll on families will generate the largest and longest-lasting challenges to school districts dealing with Sandy’s aftermath.
Staff and students will be disoriented by the loss of their homes, and parents will be dealing with overwhelming issues like insurance claims, mortgages and other complex financial matters, child care, loss of jobs and transportation, life without heat or power – and the list goes on, Sherman said.
Teachers and administrators can expect an uptick in disciplinary and behavioral issues, illness and absenteeism among students and shorter tempers among parents, Sherman said.
To help ease the burdens, he said, psychologists and counselors played a major role during the recovery in Schoharie, and the district reduced homework volume, retaining the rigor. Allowing students to be actively involved in recovery work also was helpful, he said.
Superintendent John Wiktorko of the Windham-Ashland-Jewett Central School District cautioned that, even when helpful programs are available, sorting through the complex red tape of the bureaucratic processes involved also can weigh on families and staff.
And even good solutions can have a downside. It was great, for example, that sports teams were able to play all their games on athletic fields of competing schools, Wiktorko said, but it meant that students spent many more hours traveling on buses.
“From the kids’ perspective, they got tired,” he noted.
On Long Island, Rogers said school officials are starting to learn similar lessons as schools start to reopen.
“It’s not back to normal,” Rogers said. “It’s back to a new normal.”