After the flood: Senior year at Herbert Hoover High School

ELKVIEW, W.Va. — “It’s just strange seeing the same walls, but being a different person.”

That is how Lexie Burke, a senior at Herbert Hoover High School, describes her final year in high school — one she and other members of Hoover’s Class of 2017 are experiencing at their former middle school, Elkview Middle School, in the ongoing aftermath of the June flood.

Madison Bowles (left) and Lexie Burke (right) are two of the Herbert Hoover High seniors closing out their high school careers at Elkview Middle School because of the flood.

“I’m not even going to lie about it, it was really weird coming back as a high school student, but in the same building as I remember everybody being different and even just being so much younger and just in a different emotional place,” Burke told MetroNews earlier this week.

Since the start of the school year, students from flooded Herbert Hoover High School, which is slated for demolition and replacement, have split school days at Elkview Middle School.

Middle school students go to class in the mornings, with high school students arriving in the afternoons to fill the same classrooms containing multiple teacher desks in shared space.

The middle school students have lockers, but there are no lockers for the high school students who carry all of their books and other supplies in their backpacks.

This is the bell schedule at Herbert Hoover High School.

For Hoover students, the school day begins with lunch at 12 p.m., immediately after the middle school students exit the building. Classes start at 12:45 p.m. using “odd” or “even” schedules on alternate days.

“On odd days, they go to 1, 3, 5, enrichment and then 7th (period). On even days, they go 2, 4, 6, enrichment and 7th,” explained Mike Kelley, Hoover principal, while sitting in the office he now shares with Melissa Lovejoy, the Elkview Middle principal.

Enrichment is for work on skills directly related to the state assessment while 7th period is for classes like show choir, band or, in Burke’s case, yearbook. On Tuesday’s “odd” day, she also had driver’s ed, civics and college English.

Her “even” days include honors anatomy and honors trigonometry.

“It is still a senior year, it’s just slightly different,” said Burke.

On the night of June 23, 2016, long before the school year started, Burke was sleeping and it was her grandfather who woke her up as water rushed into the basement of her family’s home, located along the Elk River halfway between Elkview and the former Herbert Hoover High.

“My head was spinning. I didn’t even really know what I was doing,” she said of what she remembered from the scramble to grab sentimental items out of her sister, mother and brother’s bedrooms on the ground floor. Her bedroom was upstairs.

“You were watching things being destroyed and couldn’t really do anything about it,” Burke said.

As the water rose, a friend arrived to drive the family to safety through rushing water. It would be days before they could return to find their home still standing, but with significant damage to one floor — damage that has only recently been fully repaired.

“We were upset and devastated, but grateful that it was only just one of the two floors,” Burke said. “There were people who lost their whole entire houses and, literally, couldn’t get anything out.”

Flood recovery work continues at her school.

This site will eventually house the modular classrooms that will make up the temporary Herbert Hoover High School campus.

Nearly eight months after the flood, work on modular classrooms for the planned temporary Herbert Hoover High School is underway but still in the early stages. The goal is to complete the transition to the new space by the end of the school year, but that target has changed multiple times.

It could be years before a permanent replacement Herbert Hoover High School is standing.

Out a classroom window, work to prep the new staff parking lot at Elkview Middle School was evident Tuesday. Parking is being shifted to make way for the modulars that will house Herbert Hoover High.

Enrollment, though, is holding steady with 772 students enrolled this year, up by two students from the same time last year, according to Kelley, who’s overseeing an ever-changing school situation.

Patience was what Dave Hall, a driver’s education and physical education teacher, was advising his students to have ahead of another planned parking lot shift on Friday.

“We all need patience,” said Hall, a Hoover grad and one of Burke’s teachers on the day MetroNews trailed her.

His classroom at Elkview Middle School is the same classroom where he got his start as a math teacher at the beginning of his career.

To be back, “It was better than the alternative of going to another school, at least we’re staying in the community. But to be back in the same room you were in, back when I was 22, 23, 24 years old, I guess everything does go around in circles,” Hall said.

Hall’s former classroom at Hoover was near the gymnasium which took one of the hardest hits in the flood.

He was able to recover three items from it: his personal baseball glove, a flash drive and a stopwatch covered in mud that still works. He uses it during his classes now at Elkview Middle.

Many students like the adjusted Hoover schedule.

“It’s kind of preparing you for college, having to not rely on having that class every day and you’ve got to keep up with your stuff,” said Madison Bowles, a senior at Hoover who is planning to start college this fall at Concord University.

Bowles (left) and Burke both have college plans. Here they are in a college English class.

She wants to play softball there while earning a degree in either biology or chemistry.

Bowles, though, has some artistic talents. She was commissioned to draw the image that will most likely be on the cover of the 2017 Herbert Hoover High yearbook: a Husky, the Hoover mascot, shaking off water.

“That, to them (the yearbook staff), represents rising above this and a community getting back on their feet,” she told MetroNews.

At times, Burke admitted, she does miss the Hoover building. She and other members of the volleyball team split time during the volleyball season with teams at Charleston Catholic High School.

“It was kind of just like a home to us. Being an athlete, it was sad not playing a home game or not having an at home senior night,” she said.

Since the storms, Burke said the entire Elkview community has had a lot of help in flood recovery, both at home and at school.

“I never knew that we had that many people in our lives until this happened,” she said. “It was cool to see and, the whole community, everybody was so ready to help each other.”

“I’m not necessarily sad anymore,” Burke said of her life as a high school senior after the flood. “These are the cards we were dealt and we’re going to play with them.”

Next year, she’ll be attending West Virginia University, possibly working toward becoming a veterinarian.

As for Burke and the other members of Hoover’s Class of 2017, “They have been presented with this tremendous challenge and they didn’t run from it, they stayed here, they’ve made the best of it,” Principal Kelley said.

“It’s an incredibly special class and it’s one that I will love for the rest of my life.”





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