Classes on schedule despite damage from flood

Basement offices hardest hit; repairs are underway

The New Mexico School for the Deaf sustained significant damage to several buildings on its campus during last week’s flooding, school officials say, but classes will start on schedule Aug. 13.

“We had some severe flooding,” senior manager Harold Moya said Wednesday. “We lost an entire basement of offices.”

As storm drains on Cerrillos Road filled the evening of July 23, amid a heavy downpour that dropped more than 3 inches of rain on some parts of Santa Fe, the surge of floodwater rushing down the road “jumped the curb and headed down our way,” Moya said. “We were sitting in two to three inches of water” in the basement offices of the school’s 1930s-era Dillon Hall.

Four school departments housed in the building, including the health center, transportation department, early intervention and outreach offices, have been moved to other parts of the campus, which is at the intersection of Cerrillos Road and St. Francis Drive.

“That definitely impacts a lot of our programs,” Moya said, adding that it could take up to three months to repair the building’s damage.

There was also water damage to a preschool classroom and elementary classroom in another building, called Hester Hall, but those rooms are expected to be repaired by around Aug. 20, Moya said.

A drainage pond, football field and maintenance building also sustained damage and are undergoing repairs.

Moya did not yet have a cost estimate for repairs.

“We were fortunate that no one was in the buildings at the time,” Moya said. No students were on campus during the storm, and the few staff members who were at the site “reacted quickly, observed and tried to stay out of the way,” he said.

The School for the Deaf, which serves about 145 residential students from

around the state at its main campus in Santa Fe and 800 others at satellite campuses, also offers two weeklong summer immersion programs on American Sign Language. The first of those was scheduled to start the night of the storm. Some people enrolled in the program were checking in as the flood hit, Moya said.

While the school was forced to cancel the first week of the program, the second week is in progress now and “moving forward as planned,” Moya said.

The school was founded in 1885 by Lars and Belle Larson, who began teaching deaf students in their Santa Fe home. Two years later, the New Mexico Legislature established it as a public school for deaf children statewide. It now serves New Mexico’s hearing-impaired children and youth from birth to age 21.