“People may have been asking why we’re rebuilding hospitals and grocery stores and businesses around town, and the reason why is sitting right here before me,” USD 422 Superintendent Darin Headrick said to open the groundbreaking ceremony for Greensburg’s new school Wednesday afternoon.
Headrick, of course, was acknowledging the district’s students as he spoke to a crowd of around 300 gathered in the temporary school’s practice gym—a temporary campus that was open for classes a year ago August 15, just 103 days after the May 4, 2007 EF-5 tornado that leveled both the elementary/junior high and senior high school buildings as well as 95 percent of the town’s structures.
Opening school on the scheduled date for fall semester classes was a pledge Headrick consistently made in the first days following the disaster—a commitment few took at face value, including featured guest speaker Governor Kathleen Sebelius.
Sebelius told the crowd she remembered talking with Headrick amidst the rubble of the devastated community mere days following the storm, hearing him repeat his intent that school would open in mid-August.
“I must tell you,” Sebelius grinned, “I thought at the time ‘the guy needs some sleep.’ But he knew a very important thing. You close the school and you close the town.”
Sebelius went on to tell the packed gymnasium Greensburg “is being watched around the nation. Thanks to Planet Green and the press I get asked all the time ‘what’s going on with the school, and the hospital. Are the kids all right? Are the families all right?’”
Sebelius then turned to the massed students at her feet, saying, “Kids you have to study even harder because you’re going to be in a first-class school. You’ll be even smarter for it.”
Local state representative Dennis McKinney followed Sebelius by lauding her efforts on the community’s behalf, noting, “Anytime we’d call a state agency it was clear they’d been put on notice to do their level best to help as best they could and that was because of the leadership of our governor.”
McKinney, whose house, now rebuilt, lies along south main Street, several blocks south of the school site, recalled walking into town with high school principal Randy Fulton and his family and Headrick, past the leveled school buildings not long after the tornado had swept through. “I saw complete devastation and realized we would’ve lost some students if that had happened earlier in the day,” he said.
He also remembered Headrick having referred to Greensburg several days later as a “blessed community” because of not having lost any students in the storm. Although there were 11 fatalities in town that night, none were of school age.
Repeating the words of an older resident who’d recently spoken to him of the costly nature of having lost his wife, McKinney told those gathered, “You can lose your money, but you haven’t lost much. You lose a family member; you’ve lost a great deal. But if you lose your faith you’ve lost everything.”
BNIM architect Casey Cassias spoke of the approximately $40 million school being a facility that “will act as a teaching tool about the environment well into the future.” He referred to him and his team having posed design ideas to Fulton, elementary principal Staci Derstein and Headrick to hear them “respond back with them wanting what was to the advantage of the students and making it a visible part of the community, keeping it on Main Street in town,” in addition to “giving separate identities to the high school, middle school and elementary schools, with both indoor and outdoor classrooms.”
Cassias also mentioned such sustainable features of design that moved the facility to LEED Platinum status as geothermal sources of heating/cooling, on site wind generation of electricity, harvesting of rainwater and use of highly sustainable and recycled building materials. He also mentioned development of a curriculum meant to “incorporate features of the school” and its sustainable design. Cassias referred to looking forward to being able to walk through the finished facility “either late spring or early fall of 2010,” echoing expectations the new school will be open for classes come August of 2010.
After earlier thanking students for “accepting the challenges” of a temporary campus that was far from complete in its first days, Headrick also expressed gratitude to parents for “deciding to stay here with your families,” as well as to his staff, to whom he gave credit for the high school having finished in the top five percent of state assessments shortly before the storm—a achievement reached by only 19 schools in Kansas.
Headrick closed the indoor portion of the ceremony by referring to the rebuilding project having received donations from “up to 500 sources” that amounted to a little over a million dollars. He then spoke of having opened an envelope earlier that day from the Clorox Corporation containing a gift of $500,000 for the school’s construction.
Clorox representative Katie Hagan commended the onlookers, saying “You could have chosen defeat; you chose hope. We’re proud to be a part of this.”
Shortly thereafter the crowed dismissed to the west edge of the football field where the actual groundbreaking was undertaken by 13 shovel-wielding students, one from each grade level chosen by random drawing.
“It’s only right they should be the ones to use the shovels,” Headrick said. “This is all about them and their future.”
