Thread: As ravaged Joplin heals, schools return on time

As ravaged Joplin heals, schools return on time

By Steve Wieberg, USA TODAY
Updated 45m ago

JOPLIN, Mo. — Quinton Anderson's back-to-school routine won't be all that routine. Critically injured in the May 22 tornado that killed 160 people, including his parents, Quinton Anderson, will be walking into his senior year at Joplin High School on his own power.

Carefully on Wednesday, the slender 17-year-old will apply dressing to a left leg that was gouged and stripped of muscle when one of the deadliest tornadoes in U.S. history tore through his home and his life in May. Anderson's father and mother were killed.

For three days, their son was missing and presumed a victim, too. Anderson also suffered a broken back, a fractured skull, a shattered eye socket and scrapes so frightful that he needed treatment in a burn unit. Almost three months later, the leg, which required skin grafts, is virtually all that's left to mend.

"I was bound and determined to heal myself, I guess as quick as my body would heal," Anderson says. "I never once thought that I wouldn't be able to go back to school."

Others in this stricken city proclaim it little short of a miracle — that in two days the senior will walk without help through the doors of a makeshift Joplin High School, that those doors are swinging open at all, that school is restarting as scheduled only 87 days after 200 mph winds carved a path of unthinkable destruction through the middle of town. The storm killed 160 people and injured more than 900.

The resumption of classes "is a benchmark … the biggest benchmark since this storm," says Melodee Colbert-Kean, a city councilwoman and mayor pro tem, who maintained since the first days after the disaster that Joplin's recovery should start with its schools.

"It gives hope. It gives us something to look forward to."

At the Church of Christ, where Anderson's father, Bill, was a deacon and Quinton returned to services last month, Pastor Richard Chambers says, "The word 'miracle' could be used in a variety of different senses. I think it would fit."

It hadn't occurred to school officials or anybody else, but many of Joplin's 19 public schools hugged a rough line running west to east through the city. That's exactly where the tornado passed on May 22, destroying four of the buildings and damaging two others so heavily that superintendent C.J. Huff says they're unlikely to be reused.

One of them, Irving Elementary, housed kindergarteners through fifth-graders who'll now attend classes in the district's 84-year-old Washington Campus building, which had been empty. In the days leading up to Wednesday's opening bell, it buzzed with happy activity.

Teachers filtered in to start readying their unfinished classrooms. Visiting children raced through hallways, dodging boxes of books and supplies. A couple of groups of volunteers, who'd bused in from a church in Cincinnati and a synagogue in Atlantic City did sorting, painting and other odd jobs.

Principal Debbie Fort fairly gushed.

"Our philosophy here," she says, "is the first couple of weeks we don't dig right into the curriculum. You get to know your students. You do a lot of team-building. You practice procedures. If you need to go to the bathroom, what are you going to do? If you need to sharpen your pencil, what are you going to do? What's our approach for walking in the hallways?

"But I think those two weeks will be a lot more hugging than in the past. We're always glad to see each other, but this year we're going to be ecstatic to see each other."

'How is that possible'

Citywide, Joplin is gradually recuperating.

Officials say most all of the 4.1 million cubic yards of commercial and residential debris has been cleared, and the destroyed Wal-Mart and Home Depot stores are among the businesses already rebuilding. Here and there in flattened neighborhoods is the fresh-lumber framework of a new home.

Of the 523 businesses affected, nearly 350 are reopened in permanent or temporary facilities. About 7,500 homes or individual apartments were demolished or heavily damaged. And although recovery there is slower, the city counts 1,700 as repaired and by last week had issued a 85 permits for new construction.

But a couple of miles from each other, the more than half-century-old brick high school and nine-story St. John's Regional Medical Center — flanked by its temporary quarters in a 9,000-square-foot tent — are empty and disfigured, enduring as symbols of the tragedy.

More than 600 eligible households need temporary housing, one-fifth of them living in two- and three-bedroom mobile homes provided by the Federal Emergency Management Agency. The rest are due to move into similar units as soon as nearby storm shelters are set up.

How deeply the storm will cut into Joplin's population, and its school enrollment, remains to be seen. Seven students were among those killed, along with a secretary at South Middle School: Quinton Anderson's mother, Sarah.

In all, about 4,200 of the district's 7,700 students lived in the tornado's track.

Huff, the superintendent, says 92% of the affected families have indicated they're coming back. Within 48 hours of the massive twister's late-afternoon touchdown, he and other officials had decided that schools would reopen on time in August.

Architects and contractors said they could pull it off, but plenty of others wondered.

"I thought, 'I don't know how we can do this. How is that possible?'" high school principal Kerry Sachetta says. "There were all kinds of ways you could have school, but not the school you want to have. Nobody wanted fields and fields and fields of modular units."

There are a few. But Huff and his crew did some maneuvering to create room in their surviving schools. They found space for middle schoolers in an industrial park and for high school freshmen and sophomores at the downtown Memorial Educational Center, which had served as a high school, middle school and junior college since it was built in 1896.

The jewel, strange as it may sound, is an old Shopko department store in the Northpark Mall — adjacent to Macy's and across the parking lot from Sears — that will house the 1,000 or so juniors and seniors who were displaced.

An average of 60 workers have labored six days a week since the middle of June and fashioned a facility that, inside, looks and feels more like a college. There are large, open community areas. A health club and student-run coffee bar. Charging stations for laptop computers (purchased with a donation from the United Arab Emirates) that will be handed free to every student.

The 21st-century concept figures to be incorporated into the new permanent high school, which will be built in the next two to three years on the same site as the old, now-crumbling landmark at 20th Street and Indiana.

"There are memories there, so I'll miss it," says Mariah Sanders, 17, a senior who already has started practice with the JHS softball team. "But it's going to be totally new. It'll be something you can tell people in college that they'll never get to experience."

'Stuff happens in life'

Some of it, no one would want to experience. The school district is bringing in extra counselors to help students struggling to come to grips with what they've experienced and seen.

"We saw some things in summer school — a lot of clinginess, a lot of fears, separation anxiety to a much higher degree than we typically experience, acting-out behavior by kids who don't typically act out," Huff says. "Those are all very much signs of trauma, and we're watching those kids very closely and starting to work with those families."

Amy Jump and her sons were part of the procession of visitors through the Washington elementary school. Conner, 7, will be a second-grader. Caden, 6, will start first. Their family rode out the storm in the basement of their home near Irving Elementary, crawling from a window when it was over to discover they'd lost everything.

Conner, his mother says, still is troubled.

"He's had a hard time with everything. He's mad at everybody," Jump says. "It hit him a little bit harder, I think, probably just because he's a little bit older and more mature. And more sensitive. Caden just kind of goes with the flow.

"But he's doing better. We're slowly replacing stuff and trying to get back to normal. Hopefully, we'll start to rebuild our house in a couple of weeks."

A day earlier, Quinton Anderson sat at the dining room table in the one-story home he's sharing with his sister, Grace. And with remarkable calm, he relived one of the most harrowing individual episodes of the storm.

The family — Bill, Sarah, Grace and Quinton — lived just three blocks east of St. John's. Grace, 22, wasn't home when the skies darkened and the sirens began blaring late that Sunday afternoon. There was only time, Quinton says, for his parents and him to huddle in a hallway with their two dogs. They had no basement.

Quinton remembers seeing sky, feeling something hit his back, then nothing more. He was found Sunday night, though he's not sure where, and airlifted to Springfield. He had no ID and no way to tell attendants who he was until he woke Wednesday from an induced coma. A nurse tapped out a text message to his father's cellphone, which Grace had recovered from the rubble: Quinton was there, battered but alive.

He remained hospitalized for 5½ weeks. Grace gently broke the news about their mom and dad.

Together, they moved into their grandparents' old home in Neosho, Mo., a half-hour's drive south. Bill had lived there when he was in high school. Like other students scattered by the storm, Quinton remains welcome in Joplin's schools.

"The only way to keep going is forward, take each day as a gift and pray for the next one," he says, speaking over the hum of an overhead kitchen fan. "I guess it's my stubbornness. Move on. Stuff happens in life. You can't expect it to go good or go bad. You've just got to live in it."

For a straight-A student with a bent for science, living meant returning to school. The backup receiver on the high school football team can no longer take the field on Friday nights, but has been elected one of five senior captains. He still can play the viola in the school orchestra, serve as a National Honor Society officer, point toward graduation and college.

The first-day bell sounds Wednesday morning at 8:30.

"Instead of being, like, wheeled in with a wheelchair or anything, I'm glad I get to walk in on my own power," says Anderson, his 6-foot frame still missing 30 of its onetime 160 pounds.

"Not being able to do things like football is kind of a small damper. But it's a small price to pay to be able to be where I'm at."

Come spring, if the leg fully heals, he hopes to run track. Maybe distance events. Maybe the long jump.

"A lot of people got it bad. A lot of them got a tough break. But if there's somebody out there who got it any worse than he did, I haven't met them yet," says football coach Chris Shields, who's entering his first season at Joplin. "I can tell you right now: I couldn't handle it as well as he has, especially at that age.

"It would not shock me if he's running track in the spring."

Perseverance and pluck have taken many forms since May 22.

Ellie Benfield was headed into first grade at Irving Elementary. Her mother, Whitney, a teacher at the school, says she talked her through a range of emotions, then watched in June as the dimpled youngster set up a lemonade stand across the street from Irving's ruins. She collected $703 for tornado relief.

One early August morning found the 7-year-old at Washington, accompanying her mother to her new school. They made their way to a second-floor classroom, where Ellie — in mismatched flip flops, her red hair pulled into pigtails — soon walked to the chalkboard. She scrawled in a lower corner:

Welcome

Back!

The little girl turned away momentarily, then turned back to the board and in two sweeps framed the words with a heart.

The bell rings there Wednesday at 7:45.

http://www.usatoday.com/news/nation/201 ... sume_n.htm

Kids in Joplin Wearing Clothes Made by Supporters in Florida

Wednesday, August 17 2011

(Joplin, MO) -- When the kids of Joplin, Missouri go back to school today, some will be dressed in style, courtesy of some caring, and talented, people in Florida.

When the South Florida Chapter of the American Sewing Guild learned of the destruction in Joplin they decided to combine their efforts and make a new outfit for every young child in the Joplin system to wear back to school.

"To be able to send each child in Joplin a new outfit for their first day of school in August," says one member. They're made by hand. They're made with love. These kids lost everything."

More than 200 outfits were handmade, placed in individual bags, and sent to Joplin - each, with an individual note of encouragement.

"It's a special little note telling them that we think they're special and to do well in school and these are people in Florida thinking about them," one of the Guild members explains.

Guild members say the boys' shirts and girls' dresses that the members assemble sometimes show up in the finest boutiques in the country, and they're proud to think they'll brighten young lives in Joplin.

http://ozarksfirst.com/fulltext?nxd_id=506737