Sunnyvale Superintendent Doug Williams was surveying campuses Wednesday when he noticed water pooling in the middle school library. The winter storm busted a pipe in one of the school district’s oldest buildings and flooding quickly began.
Williams asked for help. The district posted an SOS message on its social media accounts. Soon dozens of volunteers arrived on campus to vacuum the water, remove the carpet and protect the books.
Then Sunnyvale leaders relied on aid to move the remaining books and shelter them from the high humidity in the room. The community’s effort helped mitigate the situation quickly, district spokeswoman Emily White said.
The middle school library’s burst pipe is the extent of the district’s damage as far as they can tell. But in the coming days, Sunnyvale and other school systems around Texas will likely contend with other challenges. Higher temperatures thawing frozen pipes could result in more property damage at the same time schools try to bring kids back into the classroom.
Students across the state have faced a disrupted year of learning, with many shifting quickly from in-person school to at-home instruction and back again because of COVID-19. It’s likely that students will deal with extensive learning loss for years to come. Every day of instruction matters, educators emphasize.
The winter storm’s havoc on school facilities could further hinder students’ ability to restart class.
“This is compounding the challenge we already have with a pandemic, but we know that this is a health and safety issue, and we must address it as the crisis occurs,” Arlington Superintendent Marcelo Cavazos said. “This will further disrupt and continue to disrupt the school year.”
Cavazos is bracing for the news that not all of Arlington’s buildings will be ready to welcome students back by Monday.
After an initial check of Arlington’s properties, 23 facilities — including 21 campuses — have sustained damage. District officials will continue to assess property damage in the coming days and bring maintenance crews in to make repairs.
Arlington may have to hire contractors to make some of the fixes, which will put the district in competition with many other Texas residents for services.
“The issues we’re dealing with, our families across Arlington are dealing with at home,” the superintendent said. Those issues included ongoing power outages and no access to water. The city told residents on Wednesday to start boiling their water because of a possible major water main break.
The Texas Education Agency announced on Thursday that districts could apply for additional waivers for missed school days if in-person instruction is not possible because of property damage and remote learning is not an option because of continued power outages. The agency encouraged districts that can’t open campuses to offer 100% remote instruction.
Fort Worth officials won’t know how severe the damage is at their campuses until administrators and custodians can get back into buildings, which likely won’t be until the weekend, said district spokesman Clint Bond.
So far, FWISD officials identified broken water lines at Daggett Montessori and Carter Riverside High School, and West Park Elementary had a broken sprinkler head in its yard. At least 14 schools were without power for sustained periods.
Power outages also impacted Dallas ISD campuses, where about 25% of campuses were without electricity at a time, according to a district statement. District officials have yet to announce what, if any, damage Dallas schools sustained.
Northeast of Dallas, Wylie ISD had two high schools and an elementary school suffer damage from burst water pipes. By Thursday afternoon, repairs at Wylie High School were completed while crews at Wylie East High School were in the final stages.
However, the damage at Dodd Elementary may take longer to fix, district spokesman Ian Halperin said
Two or three classrooms are damaged, but the district plans to reopen the elementary school and resume in-person learning Monday as long as everything else is in working order. If the district is unable to return to in-person learning for any reason, Halperin said the goal would be to shift to virtual learning.
“Our maintenance guys, our ground guys, our trades guys, they really have had no time off since this started,” Halperin said. “First, it was kind of a snow shovel deal. Now it’s more of a: We need plumbers and guys with mops, and technical expertise. So they’ve done a really good job.”
A fleet of maintenance, custodial and transportation staff found some damage as they surveyed Grand Prairie ISD campuses on Thursday. But the district expects more could arise, spokesman Sam Buchmeyer said.
“With frozen water, you never know what’s going to happen,” he said.
GPISD officials plan to offer in-person instruction Monday. The district is committed to bringing students back to campus “unless nature throws us a curveball,” Buchmeyer said.
Nature did just that in Melissa ISD, where the district’s early childhood center faced significant flooding this week.
The Melissa Ridge Education Center’s sprinkler system burst, causing flooding in about 60% of the building. Despite getting restoration crews out early to begin repairs, Deputy Superintendent Robert Rich said they may lose the center for the remainder of the year.
The district already notified parents that they will move to remote instruction next week while in-person learning resumes for other schools in the Collin County district. Rich said the district would have to find other arrangements for the center’s 400 students if they can’t return for the rest of the school year.
The full extent of potential campus damages across school districts won’t be known until late next week as temperatures rise.
“I think that we’ll learn a lot starting [Friday] when the temperature gets above freezing,” Rich said.
Staff writer Valeria Olivares contributed to this report.
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