This will add so much more disruption to the Harvey recovery efforts.
More than 10,000 Houston Independent School District students are expected to start classes in temporary quarters as officials work to repair hundreds of campuses damaged by Hurricane Harvey, Superintendent Richard Carranza said Saturday.
Carranza said the district still plans to start school on Sept. 11, though officials have not yet decided which campuses will be temporarily closed or where displaced students will be sent. Those calls will be made no earlier than Tuesday, he said.
“There is that slight chance there will be a delay past Sept. 11, but we’re working with all due haste to make sure we’re going to meet that deadline,” Carranza said. “There has always been the caveat that we will not put students and staff in harm’s way.”
The damage estimates come as school districts across the Houston area struggled to open their doors after widespread flooding. Cy-Fair ISD on Saturday pushed its start date back to Sept. 11, citing sewage issues at several schools.
Humble ISD set a Sept. 7 return date, but alerted parents Saturday that Kingwood High School could be closed all year.
“Flood waters devastated KHS,” according to a notice posted on the district’s website. “The building is unsafe and unhealthy.”
[…]
In Houston ISD, at least 200 of the 245 schools inspected were found to have sustained damage, officials said. Of those, 53 sustained “major” damage and 22 had “extensive” damage, the most severe label given by district officials.
Another 30 or so schools were still being inspected, including 15 that had been inaccessible because of severe flooding around the buildings, HISD Chief Operating Officer Brian Busby said early Saturday. The district operates 280 schools.
“There may be a situation where a school is so badly damaged that we may not be able to re-open that school,” Carranza said, after a tour of waterlogged Hilliard Elementary in northeast Houston on Saturday. “It’s too early right now to make that call.”
There’s too much to try to capture in excerpts, so go read the rest. Pretty much everything is on the table – sharing school buildings with different shifts for classes, busing kids to other schools, who knows what else. How will this affect things like STAAR testing and the TEA takeover threat that the district faces? No one knows right now. It’s going to be a crazy, disjointed, bizarre year, here and in other districts. Honestly, given that some districts that were directly in the path of Harvey when it was still a hurricane are unable to function at all and will have to send their students to another district altogether, it could be worse. It’s still pretty bad, and it will be bad all year. We will get through it, but it’s going to take a lot of effort and in the end a huge amount of money.
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