Video reveals repair needs at high school

WOODSTOCK, Ga. — The short documentary video opens with a high school student explaining how human waste flows up from the ground and floods an area where he and his friends eat lunch.

In the eight-minute video with background music and captions of key quotes, students at Druid Hills High School use iPhones to document the classrooms, hallways and bathrooms that are crumbling around them.

In several scenes, plaster is falling off walls, and water is dripping around electrical outlets in one area. So much water has leaked into the weight room that it oozes up from the floor when a student steps on it. Another student demonstrates how one of the holes in a ceiling is so large that he can put his entire hand through it.

“You can tell someone about the conditions, but when you visually see it, it’s a lot more impactful,” sophomore Harley Martz, one of the students who produced the video, said in an interview. “Some of the things we pointed out in the video are very undeniable.”

“As you walk through the school now, you can smell the mold, and it’s kind of really nasty,” Montrice Berry, a junior student at Druid Hills, said in the video. “So I tend to walk outside just so I can avoid the smell.”

Now, after the video came out, “every time I go walking the halls, people are like ‘I’m so proud of you for speaking up,’ ” Berry said in an interview.

The video, which has garnered more than 27,000 views since it was posted on YouTube this month, has prompted outrage among some parents in the suburban area just east of Atlanta who want repairs made. It was produced after the DeKalb County School Board in February removed Druid Hills from a list of schools in need of priority renovations.

The video won praise from other students.

“I walked into my first period and my fellow students were applauding,” Martz said.

It is the latest effort by students, parents and teachers across the nation to show people what conditions are like in their schools — and make their case that improvements are badly needed.

The DeKalb County School Board will consider a resolution “to modernize Druid Hills High School,” according to the meeting agenda for Monday. The school has been in operation since the 1920s and is among the oldest in Georgia, according to historical accounts from the school district.