The floodwaters invaded a kindergarten classroom at Kempton Street Literacy Academy so suddenly and forcefully that staff could not open the door.
So on Jan. 22, its principal Janet Josa came up with an emergency evacuation on the fly: She and school staff took out a window and hoisted kindergartners through it to get them to safety, said Clara Izadi Calabrase, coordinator of behavior intervention and supports for La Mesa-Spring Valley School District who helped with evacuation.
“The water came higher than their heads, so it was one of those things where it happens very quickly, and you have to respond very quickly,” she said.
On that Monday in January, staff in schools from Coronado to Spring Valley became first responders, moving quickly to rescue students from fast-rising floodwaters by evacuating them to high ground.
Now in the weeks after that flooding devastated parts of San Diego County, some schools and districts are still reckoning with the physical and mental toll the storm wrought on students, their families and their school campuses.
“We can’t overstate the disruption that this caused and continues to be,” Coronado Unified Superintendent Karl Mueller said at a Thursday board meeting. “This profession is difficult enough, you never know what you’re going to be faced with when you start a school day. To add a natural disaster … just completely throws a wrench into the services we provide.”
In the weeks following, schools served as vital community resource hubs for families, providing food, clothing, mental health counseling and referrals to housing, medical and other services. In La Mesa-Spring Valley families have made use of the district’s longstanding resource center at Kempton, called CASA, that offers food, clothing and other basic needs for families.
And school staff connected families who were displaced from their homes with a countywide program that provides free temporary housing in a motel for families experiencing homelessness. That includes about 100 families just from San Diego Unified, according to a district spokesperson.
“What we’ve seen, not only that week but in the weeks since, is that families seek out the school even more now than in the past for their needs,” Izadi Calabrase said.
School counselors, social workers, teachers and other staff also deployed mental health support for students. Teachers held restorative circles and shared coping tools for students to help them address trauma from the storm, said Jennifer Coronel, La Mesa-Spring Valley’s student supports director. One of the biggest traumas for students, staff said, was that several of them had lost their pets who had drowned in the flood.
All 21 of La Mesa-Spring Valley School District’s campuses sustained some damage, with Kempton Street Literacy Academy and Bancroft Elementary the hardest hit.
Every room at Bancroft was flooded with, on average, a foot of water, said La Mesa-Spring Valley Superintendent David Feliciano. Mud also infiltrated classrooms across campus, sliding off a hill behind the school.
The damage was so extensive that the district moved the Bancroft student body and staff to Spring Valley Academy while their home school has undergone remediation and repairs. The district has been providing free transportation for students from Bancroft to Spring Valley Academy. At Kempton, the school was able to relocate students from impacted classrooms to other places on campus.
SOUL Academy, a school under the San Diego County Office of Education, has also been closed for weeks due to flood damage. The school has been in virtual learning while repairs are ongoing; it has provided laptops and internet connection to students.
The La Mesa-Spring Valley district alone sustained $10 million to $15 million in costs due to the storm, Feliciano estimates.
That includes the costs of overtime pay for employees who did flood cleanup, installing new flooring and asbestos abatement they had to conduct when replacing the floors, Feliciano said. The district also had to replace furniture, supplies and employees’ personal property.
Feliciano expects some of the district’s costs to be covered by insurance and hopes state or federal disaster aid will cover the rest.
Coronado Unified is also continuing repairs at several sites. On Jan. 22, the entire ground level of Coronado’s Village Elementary flooded, as well as facilities at Coronado Middle, Coronado High and the Early Childhood Development Center, which also suffered a gas leak during the flood, Coronado Unified Deputy Superintendent Donnie Salamanca said at Thursday’s board meeting.
The district had crews on campuses later that day working as late as 1 a.m. the next day to remove water from buildings. Within the following days, workers also sanitized facilities and pulled out wet drywall.
Since then crews have been installing new drywall and insulation, which is expected to be completed by Monday, Salamanca said.
“We’re hopeful that just a month after the incident, we’re as close to normal as possible,” he said.
In the summer the district plans to repaint classrooms, install new tackboard panels in classrooms and replace damaged flooring, he added.
