Vidor ISD breaks ground on new Middle School after long wait

In 2017, Tropical Storm Harvey inundated Vidor and the surrounding area with unprecedented amounts of rain — stranding families and leaving schools filled with water for days.

The Enterprise chronicled the profound impact of learning in portable buildings from early on. In 2019, students and teachers relayed their emotions of guilt and sorrow.

Killgo, in a 2019 interview with The Enterprise, recalled the emotional experience of surveying the damage from a helicopter as he flew out of the flood-ravaged city.

And Jimmy Grimes, a fifth-grade English; language arts; and reading teacher, told The Enterprise that before Harvey made landfall, he and the rest of the staff had been preparing for the semester set to start in a week. But when they returned, nothing was left to be salvaged. He lost his personal library and countless resources collected over a 13-year career.

“You have this idea of what it’s supposed to look like in your mind,” Grimes said. “To see everything ruined — there are no words.”

The destruction forced students and teachers into temporary portable buildings as officials went head-to-head with the Federal Emergency Management Agency for funding to rebuild the school.

The portable buildings initially were intended as a short-term solution, with plans being discussed to demolish the former middle school as early as Oct. 2019. But a series of FEMA reviews and redundancies led to months-long delays that stretched into years.

In fact, some students have been in the portables for so long, they don’t remember what it’s like otherwise.

Collin Johnson was just beginning school when Harvey ravaged the campus. He is now moving into the fourth grade.

“He started kindergarten — dropped off supplies in different places on the ground, around the teacher desk and everything,” said his mother Marilee, an art teacher at one of the campuses. “And then within just a few days, the hurricane just came in and swept all those school supplies away and all those teachers’ cute little classrooms.”

While Collin said learning in the modular buildings can be fun, a number of other teachers and students expressed a far different attitude.

Fifth-grade teacher Martha Scott said the experience brought “a lot of anxiety … Until they finally said, ‘Okay we finally get to tear down the building.’ That was like, wow, maybe we are finally coming to an end. And now, today with the groundbreaking, is just incredible.”

Staci Glach, a sixth-grade math teacher, said the progress has been much-anticipated.

“It's a great feeling,” she said. “It was really hard, because we're so used to being together on the same campus, and we're really a close school and so for us to not be able to see each other all the time, even in passing was hard.”

But on Thursday, they all got to look ahead. Killgo said he expects the project to be finished within the next two years — as long as the weather cooperates.

“It is just going to be an awesome experience, putting the kids in a good environment, an environment which they can learn and they're going to be thrilled,” Killgo said. “They've just been through a lot, staff and the students and, you know, even this week I was walking over the campus and it is, you know, they've gotten used to it, but it's less than ideal, so, you know, it's just a great feeling.”

isaac.windes@hearstnp.com

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