A year removed from the Oct. 20, 2019 tornado that slashed a 15-mile path from northwest Dallas to Richardson, Dallas ISD is still reeling from the destruction.
While more than 20 public and private schools were in the storm’s path, three DISD campuses -- Thomas Jefferson High School, Cary Middle School and Walnut Hill Elementary -- were the hardest hit of any schools in the area.
All three buildings are still closed, years away before reopening their doors to students, and a controversy over the contract for rebuilding the schools has put the district’s plans back even further.
Students at those three campuses have been shuffled into other schools, or shuttled out to other facilities for instruction.
And yet, learning is still happening -- even with the added stresses of the coronavirus pandemic put on the shoulders of students, families, teachers and administrators.
“We took our culture, and put it in another building,” said Walnut Hill principal Phillip Potter. “We lost a building, but we didn’t lose our school.”
‘A huge problem’
Damage along the tornado’s path varied tremendously, not surprising given the fickle nature of tornadoes and the ebb and flow of that particular vortex.
DISD’s Burnet and Cigarroa elementary schools -- near Webb Chapel Road, north of Bachman Lake and west of the trio of severely damaged schools -- received enough damage to keep them closed for about a week. DISD used a basketball arena to hold classes for those schools, until power could get restored and storm damage cleared.
At St. Mark’s School of Texas, just east of the Dallas North Tollway, several buildings on the north side of its campus suffered heavy damage. The east and west sides of the school’s gym were blown out, the performing arts building lost a portion of its roof, and the bell tower was stripped of its brick façade in several places.
The Cambridge School of Dallas -- a small private, Christian prep school that rented space behind Northway Church -- was savaged by the winds. HVAC systems were bowled into some picnic tables; the school’s van and SUV had been swept to the property’s perimeter, bunched against the fence and trees. Cambridge has relocated to an interim campus for this school year, with designs on moving into a new campus by 2021.
But no cluster of schools was harder hit than three Dallas ISD campuses: Cary, Thomas Jefferson and Walnut Hill.
DISD Superintendent Michael Hinojosa was watching the Cowboys game on the night of Oct. 20, when he got a message from his wife, Kitty.
She was out of town, but was still watching the weather, and a line of storms had her worried. She told him to make sure he took the cushions off the patio furniture on their 11th-floor balcony, so Hinojosa got off the couch that he was sharing with his chihuahuas and went outside.
“It looked like a pretty heavy storm was coming, but we see those every once in a while,” Hinojosa said.
Within minutes after the storms rolled through, Hinojosa’s phone lit up. While it was still dark, and proper assessments were days away, the district’s operations teams let Hinojosa know the outlines of the disaster.
“We were going to have a problem, a huge problem,” was the message.
The tornado scoured the north end of a site shared by Cary and TJ. Cary took the brunt of the damage -- its roof buckled in various spots throughout the building. At the high school, portable classrooms located at the back of the campus were obliterated. Roofs were peeled away, windows busted in.
At Walnut Hill’s historic campus, shards of the school’s red-clay tiles littered the neighborhood. Part of the auditorium roof was sheared off, with the school’s sprinkler system flooding that portion of the building.
When Hinojosa made his way to the schools early the next day, he couldn’t believe what he saw.
“We normally had a police vehicle that we parked outside of Cary for security, but that had been picked up and thrown against the portables in the middle of that field,” he said. “The weight room behind TJ, it was all ravaged. It was all just so devastating to me.”
From ‘A+’ to ‘rock bottom’
Almost immediately, the district went into triage and began developing a plan to move three campuses to other schools by the end of the week.
Cary’s 560 students were split between two nearby middle schools, Ben Franklin and Medrano. The other two campuses were relocated en masse to existing DISD facilities that were either vacant or being used for other purposes.
Walnut Hill’s 400 students went 5 miles west, crossing Interstate 35E, to the vacant Tom Field Elementary. Thomas Jefferson’s 1,800 students went 9 miles west to the former Thomas Edison Middle School site.
And amazingly, the plans went off as well as could have been expected. Hinojosa graded the district’s short-term response “an A+.”
The schools' principals said most of the students went to the new sites thanks to diligent staff work and community support. But grades did suffer, particularly among the high school students.
With students focused less on learning and more on getting back to some sense of normalcy -- finding a new place to live, getting a car fixed, finding new work -- TJ principal Sandi Massey said the scores for the school’s third six-week period in January were “when we hit rock bottom.”
A renewed effort from her staff and students for the next six-week period -- where school’s scores bounced back in nearly all content areas -- left Massey feeling good about finishing out the school year strong.
“And then COVID happened,” she said.
Evelyn Loma, a freshman at TJ last year, was just getting used to being on a high school campus when the tornado hit. Then just as she was getting used to the Edison campus, COVID-19 shuttered that school.
“I feel like everything stopped,” Loma said. “All of our plans, everything. I was really looking forward to the whole freshman experience. But with the tornado and COVID, a lot happened in a year. Out of everything I dreamt that it would be, I never could imagine this.”
Massey said that her enrollment now sits at 1,615, with about 700 students doing face-to-face instruction and the remainder working virtually from home.
The past 12 months have been like a trip through a dark forest, she said.
“You can’t see ahead of you, and you really don’t know what’s around the next bend,” Massey said. “But you’ve got to keep moving forward, and hope that eventually you get out of the trees.”
Much still to do
But DISD has yet to make visible steps to a clear path on rebuilding TJ and the other schools, and a recent controversy surrounding the project’s original contractor has set the district’s timeline back several months.
In January, the district’s board of trustees approved nearly $132 million in construction projects at the damaged campuses and hired Core Construction to do the work.
Just over $82 million would go to an extensive renovation of Thomas Jefferson, which was already undergoing renovations from the 2015 bond project when the tornado hit. Nearly $50 million would create a new pre-K through eighth grade campus on the site of Cary Middle School, absorbing the students from Walnut Hill. A career institute would be built on the old Walnut Hill site.
In the spring, trustee Maxie Johnson started raising questions to district staff about inconsistencies in the contracts signed by Core and its subcontractors.
In July, the board went into closed session to talk with its attorney about pending or considered litigation, citing that they would be discussing misconduct allegations on a district construction project.
And in August, the board ended its contract with Core, pointing to a provision in its contract that allowed the district to sever the relationship “for convenience.”
More information hasn’t been forthcoming from district officials, who have been tight-lipped about what happened in its relationship with Core Construction; the school district has also not responded to open records requests from March through September, stating that normal business operations were closed because of COVID-19.
DISD has hired a new contractor, Beck, to do the work. But the controversy put the district’s plans back at least four months, with the schools now slated to open in October 2022 at the earliest.
Hinojosa said it’s important for him that the current sophomore class be able to have some time in the new building as seniors.
Massey said she expects her student body to grow to 2,000 students or more when the new construction is completed.
“I think it’s going to be a challenging three years,” Massey said. "And I can foresee us losing a few more kids. But the closer that building gets, the more students will be motivated to get back on campus, because the design is incredible. It will be our true stomping grounds.
“Like I tell people right now, ‘We’re borrowing this building, we own that one.’”
‘Can-do spirit’
A bright spot from the tornado has been the outpouring of community support, Hinojosa said.
The district had relaunched its nonprofit arm, the Dallas Education Foundation, just weeks prior to storms. The foundation had been largely dormant for the previous two years, basically only receiving $70,000 in yearly donations from Texas Instruments for teacher innovation awards, said Mita Havlick, who was hired in September 2019 to oversee the foundation.
Havlick and the new foundation board were still developing communications and marketing strategies when the tornado struck. Called to action, the group pushed forward immediately -- with tremendous success.
To date, the foundation has raised close to $5 million, with $3.2 million earmarked for 10 campuses affected by the storms. Significant donations from Mark Cuban, Mary McDermott Cook and a slew of businesses and philanthropic organizations made that possible, Havlick said.
“One of the reasons I love this city and this district so much is its can-do spirit,” Hinojosa said.
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