During the first weeks of the year, teacher Juliet Safier helps welcome students to their new school building.
“T
he first day it really rains, it’s going to be quite distracting,” said Juliet Safier, pointing out over a covered outdoor play area of shrieking kids to the rolling green land beyond. Given the colossal flood that ravaged Safier’s small town of Vernonia in 2007, heavy rain would seem an obvious disturbance. But, this Vernonia High School English teacher isn’t talking about the haunting memories of water rising over empty desks. She is not talking about the muddy, wet students crammed into modular buildings instead of classrooms. She is not talking about the past at all. She and this tiny-but-resilient town are focused on the future. “Our roof is slanted, so it’s all going to come off to a waterfall,” she adds with a smile. “We have bioswales all over the campus where runoff water will go.” In the winter of 2007, water was the enemy when torrential floods claimed hundreds of homes in the community — as well as Vernonia’s schools. Less than five years later, the district’s new K through 12 school, which was built to LEED-Platinum
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Today’s OEA | October 2012
standards, harnesses the power of water. “Under that patch of grass is a gigantic water tank,” Safier said. “We have water underneath all the floors that heats and cools.” It is a story of tragedy turned success that could easily not have been. In this community of just over 2,000 people, where a tough economy was already steering residents elsewhere, building a new school meant raising taxes and asking more of citizens who had already lost so much. Yet, the alternative—losing the schools for good—was too harsh a notion for many in the community. “In Vernonia, our schools are—it sounds so corny—but our schools are the heart of our community,” said Teri Willard, who teaches Spanish and leadership. Without a school, the town would be missing a vital connector. Students could have been bussed elsewhere, perhaps to Banks or Scappoose, but that would have meant the end of Vernonia as a self-contained town. “I think (our school) is the thing that keeps it all together,” Byron Brown said. He teaches government, forestry and
several other subjects and coaches the track and cross country teams. “(In 2009), they passed the school bond in a horrible economy,” Brown remembered. “They still went out there and taxed themselves more.” Passing the bond was just one in a slew of moves that showed the compassionate heart beating beneath this former logging community’s gritty, tough facade. It is the privacy, independence and self-reliance of small-town life that draws people to Vernonia. But when the floods hit the town in 2007, the community rallied together. “This town definitely has strong wills. They are very family oriented and community cognizant. (And) this isn’t the first tragedy,” Safier said, referring to a flood that hit the community hard a decade earlier in 1996. “They knew something had to be done.” “These 2,000 people are it for 25 miles in any direction, so we really depend on each other,” Willard added. “That’s a challenge for us, being so isolated.” Passing the bond meant maintaining the tight-knit community connection that had come to be a way of life in Vernonia, but it meant