BY PORTSIA SMITH
For the first time since the earthquake that rattled the region last Aug. 23, middle and high school students in Louisa County will return to a normal five-day schedule Wednesday.
The 1,500 students at Louisa High School will attend classes in a new modular facility that the school system is renting until repairs are made at the original high school, which had structural damage as a result of the magnitude-5.8 quake.
Tuesday, students, parents and members of the community visited what Louisa Schools Superintendent Deborah Pettit calls the “modular village.”
It is made up of about 22 trailer buildings that are set up like an open-air campus-style school. The complex has about 90 classrooms.
“It’s a lot nicer than I thought it was going to be,” said 11th-grader Ariel Baber. “It’s not like a trailer; it’s made like a school.”
Students were given their new schedules and were able to visit their teachers and see where their classrooms will be.
High school students will attend classes Monday through Friday from 8 a.m. to 3:52 p.m., said Principal Tom Smith.
That’s compared with the 8 a.m. to 4:50 p.m. schedule on Mondays, Wednesdays and Fridays when they were sharing the middle school building. Middle school students had been attending classes on Tuesdays, Thursdays and every other Saturday.
Thomas Jefferson Elementary School was also damaged during the earthquake. Students at that school moved into mobile classrooms in September.
While the move to modulars is temporary, Pettit said it may take three or four years for the high school to be fixed. She said it has not been decided yet if it will be repaired or rebuilt.
“We have all of our students in their own building,” she said Tuesday night. “Now I feel like we are one step further along in recovering, although we have a long way to go.”
It took about three months for the modular buildings to be set up with wiring, plumbing and furnishings, Pettit said.
“We fit the whole high school in the parking lot,” she said. There’s even a library, a cafeteria and a cosmetology lab.
Teachers including Jesse Cleaver spent most of this past weekend preparing their classrooms for opening day Wednesday.
“I’m happy to have my own room again and my own space,” said Cleaver, a 10th-grade math teacher.
While the facility is nice, it does come with a price, Pettit said.
Insurance and financial assistance from state and federal agencies will cover most of the costs, but she said the county will still have to come up with about 9 percent of it.
But parents said they are happy their children are back in school full time and can try to return to normal after such a disastrous event.
“It’s sad that they aren’t able to go into the high school because it was my high school too, but this is a really nice facility that they have in the interim,” said Sharon Baker–Evans, whose daughter Samantha is in the 11th grade. “What an effort everyone has put in just to get our kids back in school and educated. They didn’t miss a beat.”
Portsia Smith: 540/374-5419
psmith@fredericksburg.com
