Kingwood High shows off renovations
Displaced following Harvey, students plot return to campus
Kingwood High School junior Marissa Amar said being displaced from her campus after Hurricane Harvey flooded it actually brought the student body closer together and led them to a realization.
“We realized the building isn’t the school,” Amar said. “We are the school.”
Hurricane Harvey inundated Kingwood High School’s first floor with floodwaters, according to Humble ISD Associate Superintendent Trey Kraemer, requiring restorations that could cost $100 million. The flooding also displaced approximately 2,700 students from their Kingwood campus.
After sharing a campus with Summer Creek High School for the past 27 weeks, Kingwood High School students and staff will return to their home campus on March 19.
Amar was one of a handful of students who had the opportunity to set foot in the newly renovated Kingwood High for the first time on Friday. Although there is still some construction going on in the school, the students got a look at the new wood-look tile flooring, textured brick walls and shiny new gym and cafeteria.
The pictures that Humble ISD posted of Kingwood High’s newly renovated facilities were a welcome sight for Amar, especially when juxtaposed with
photos of the school after Harvey. But it’s one thing to see the pictures, she said, and another to experience it in real life.
Junior Abigail McCollum agreed. “Pictures just didn’t do it justice,” McCollum said. “It’s like our home got a face-lift, and it’s just beautiful.”
Humble ISD will host a grand reopening ceremony on March 24, when they’ll celebrate the restored campus with a pep rally, band music, games and food trucks.
It will be a celebration of something the district did not think possible in the days and weeks following Harvey.
When Humble ISD Superintendent Elizabeth Fagen walked into the waterlogged Kingwood High School days after the hurricane made landfall and dumped more than 50 inches of rain on some parts of the Houston area, she said the devastation was beyond what she’d imagined.
“The amount of water that was still in there — the smell, the darkness, the doors had all swollen — it was beyond what I thought was possible,” Fagen said.
District officials initially thought reopening Kingwood High School before the end of the school year was impossible. But, it was something they really wanted — especially KHS students, Fagen said.
Fagen said her own experiences with her neighbor reminded her how important it was to get Kingwood High students back to their home campus.
When Fagen saw her neighbor brave floodwaters to retrieve her young daughter’s backpack from the home they had just evacuated, it was a reminder of how important school is to a child’s sense of normalcy.
“My neighbor said it was the one thing her daughter wants — her new backpack with her school supplies so that when she goes to school the first day, she’s got her backpack and school supplies exactly as it was planned and it’s not been disrupted,” Fagen said. “That really resonated with me.”
Senior class president Ingrid Pina said going to Summer Creek has been a beneficial educational experience, but she and many other Kingwood High School seniors are excited to be finishing out the school year on their own campus.
“Before you start your senior year, it’s the last year of high school and you really picture it, and this was the backdrop I was picturing,” she said, smiling as she stood in a hallway at Kingwood High.
However, the move back to Kingwood High School may be a bittersweet experience for some Kingwood and Summer Creek staff, according to Kraemer.
Kraemer described a photo taken recently of all 500 Summer Creek and Kingwood High staff members sitting side-byside in the Summer Creek gym bleachers. He imagines that 20 years from now when people look back on that photo, they will see it as a reflection of one of the most impactful moments in the history of Humble ISD.
“When you spend that much time in a crisis moment like we were in with Harvey, you bring together two schools and build those relationships and then all of a sudden that’s over with, it’s like your family member’s moving out,” Kraemer said.