Storm breaks buildings, not spirit

On March 31, a tornado destroyed most of Wynne High School. No one was killed, and the district lost five days of school. Here’s the story of what happened, how the district responded, and, on the following pages, what happens next.

By Steve Brawner Editor

March 31 seemed to start like a typical day at the Wynne School District, other than the storm warnings that had been occurring for days beforehand. The superintendent, Dr. Kenneth Moore, did his workout and devotional before school and checked the weather. The storm wasn’t supposed to hit until 6 p.m., well after the buses would be back in the shop. The protocol was not to take any action if bad weather was forecast for after 5 p.m. He decided not to dismiss classes early and go on with the day’s plans. Those plans included grilling fish caught by Assistant Superintendent Eric Foister for a potluck lunch to thank the staff for preparing for that month’s school board meeting.

As the morning wore on, Moore began having second thoughts. The Weather Channel had said there was a 5 out of 5 threat for severe weather. He called Nathan Morris, the superintendent at the nearby Cross County School District. Like Moore, Morris initially wasn’t planning on dismissing school early – his district has safe rooms – though he later decided to do so because of the threat of severe weather while the buses were on their routes. Moore started grilling the fish.

By 11:30 a.m., the forecast had the storm hitting Wynne at 5 p.m. instead of 6. Moore decided to dismiss classes at 1:30 p.m.

“Man, the Lord’s just telling me we need to send them home,” he recalled telling Foister. “I know we’re on that edge, and I know the possibilities are slim. I know when we send them home, [they’re] in a lot safer place at this school than some of the homes we would send them to. But for whatever reason, I think it’s the Lord is just saying, ‘Get them out of here.’”

Foister told him he would be criticized and warned him not to check Facebook the rest of the day. They still had their potluck.

Moore’s decision was criticized by some in the community – for a few hours. He was disrupting the lives of 2,480 students and their families along with 350 staff members, all in response to storm warnings that are not particularly unusual in Arkansas in the spring.

But the decision may have saved untold numbers of lives, including, perhaps, his and three of his children. The National Weather Service later reported that from 4:30 p.m. to 5:54 p.m., an EF-3 tornado traveled 73 miles across eastern Arkansas. The storm reached estimated peak winds of 150 miles per hour and a maximum width of 1,600 yards – almost a mile. It tore through Wynne, killing four, injuring 26, destroying houses, badly damaging the First United Methodist Church and destroying much of Wynne High School.

A camera at Southern Ambulance Service across Falls Boulevard showed the tornado crossing the street at 4:46 p.m. headed straight for the school. It also damaged the intermediate school.

Moore, 41 and a 2000 Wynne High School graduate, was at home when it all happened. He left school at 4:15 p.m. when he learned all the buses had returned from their routes and was sitting on his front porch watching the weather when his wife, Cassie, told him to get inside. Her best friend had texted her pictures of the storm approaching behind her house. Police scanners were sounding the alarm. His family got in their storm shelter. The storm went behind their house.

Five minutes later, Head Mechanic Bob Morris called Moore using FirstNet, a subscription service offered by AT&T for first responders and public safety personnel, and said, “You need to get down here. It’s bad.”

Moore jumped into his truck and headed to Wynne High School. Most of it was gone. About 170,000 square feet of space – everything except the football fieldhouse, the basketball arena and the high school library – was damaged to the point that it will be replaced. The football turf was ripped off the field. Even though the tornado had just struck, chainsaws were already running nearby. Friends from the south side of town later told him that when they knew the tornado wasn’t going to hit them, they had waited until it cleared, grabbed their chainsaws and headed to the city. He made his way to where his office once stood. It was destroyed. A staff member’s truck was blown against the building, causing a brief moment of panic until they could locate him. It turned out he had left town. Meanwhile, Moore communicated with his team through FirstNet. Without it, he would have been cut off from his people because cell service and electricity were down. Meanwhile, Assistant Superintendent Stephanie Lyons, a 1989 graduate and a former kindergarten teacher in charge of transportation and maintenance, was trying to get back to Wynne. She was on a plane headed to Denver for a conference when the tornado struck. As soon as she got off the plane, she went to the ticket counter to get a flight home. Wynne School Board President Stacie Schlenker was trying to get home across town from the Cross County Hospital, where she works as the pharmacy director. It took her an hour to make what normally would be a five-minute trip home. Her house had some broken windows and lots of holes in the roof, but it’s not a loss. Meanwhile, her dad’s house, visible from hers, was destroyed. She eventually left her car in a stranger’s driveway so she could hitch a ride in her nephew’s side-by-side utility vehicle.

“It was so insane,” she said. “It was like a movie because everybody was in the streets. … In every neighborhood you went through, people were just everywhere just coming out to see what had just happened.” She later added, “I don’t know that you could talk to anybody in the community that doesn’t have a personal story. It’s almost like 9-11. Everybody’s going to remember where they were, what they were doing, the sounds, the smells. I mean, I just think it’s ingrained in your memory.”

Moore quickly got in touch with Foister and Athletic Director Bryan Mattox. Mattox wife, Alicia, had already opened the junior high, which only lost electricity for 20 minutes. It stayed open six nights for families left homeless by the storm. The temporary residents included a gentleman with special needs found walking along the road. Early on, the junior high was serving 2,000 meals twice a day. Volunteers from the city and fire station helped. Within three days, the cafeteria had served all its commodities, but others including Jonesboro restaurants sent food. Moore contacted Nabholz, the district’s construction manager, on Saturday and asked for help with the response the next day. Adam Seiter, Nabholz’s executive vice president of operations, said the company sent a dozen staff members that day. Nabholz employees would identify areas with the structural engineer that were safe and unsafe, identify areas with sensitive information and retrieve it, and fence off the site.

“Our big deal was to make sure we built temporary walls that at least kept the honest man from putting himself in a situation where he could get hurt,” he said.

Nabholz built temporary walls inside to create safe zones to allow people back inside. Storage containers were delivered to the property where items could be saved. Ten teachers, including one with 38 years of teaching experience, could not get to their rooms, meaning they could not retrieve years’ worth of memories and mementos.

“Teachers who have taught for any length of time, that classroom is their home,” Schlenker said. “They have so many personal belongings in there that are really sentimental to them, so it was important for us to try to let them get as much out of their classrooms as they possibly could.”

It could have been much worse What would have happened had Moore not sent everyone home? At the time the school was hit, the only people on campus were two coaches and their families who had left their homes and sought shelter in the dressing room beneath one of the gyms. They were unharmed, but when they left the dressing room they were greeted with daylight. If school had not dismissed early, there would have been afterschool activities occurring there, along with baseball, softball, soccer and track practices. Buses would still have been traveling on routes along where the tornado hit. He likely would have been in his office with his daughter, while his two youngest children would have been in a part of the intermediate school whose roof was ripped off with everything inside sucked out.

“Even in our quote-unquote safe places, we would have had loss,” he said.

While the disaster response was occurring, the district also had to think about school. The storm struck on a Friday. The next day, school officials met with Arkansas Secretary of Education Jacob Oliva. The transplant from hurricane-prone Florida told him students needed to get back in school. Moore assembled the administration team that afternoon for a debriefing, and they started planning. Intermediate Principal Shirley Taylor had lost her house Friday. She was at school the next day and remained there until Tuesday.

On Sunday, Gov. Sarah Huckabee Sanders visited the Wynne High campus along with Oliva and Federal Emergency Management Agency Administrator Deanne Criswell. Sanders had already requested a federal disaster declaration from President Biden’s administration, which would be granted that day. They and local officials walked the campus and then briefly spoke to the media, where Sanders declared, “I’ve been very clear that our perspective is that people are going to come first and the paperwork will come second.”

Moore had to decide what to do next. Students had just returned from spring break, which lasts two weeks in Wynne because the school has a year-round schedule. School the next week was out of the question, but the district had a couple of extra days built into its schedule because it already planned to take off for Good Friday and also Monday, the day after Easter.

“Our goal is hopefully we can get our babies back and in these classrooms and in these buildings by April 10,” he said then. They actually would return Wednesday, April 12, with Sanders there to welcome them back.

One of the first activities was contacting staff members and students. Staff members had verbally spoken to every student by Monday except three in the intermediate school. When they were finally found, Taylor, the principal who lost her home but wouldn’t leave the school, finally broke down emotionally. Moore ordered her to leave the school and go rest. Remarkably, only four community members died. One was a mother with three children who were injured, two of them Wynne students.

Because most of the other school facilities were undamaged or at least usable, school officials were able to get students back in school within five educational days. The roof on one intermediate school wing was torn off, which meant four fourth-grade classrooms and some facilitator rooms were out of commission. Students in those classrooms were moved elsewhere in the school. The state provided portable airconditioning units to replace the cafeteria’s, which were ripped off. The district requested and received a waiver from the State Board of Education to forgive the five days lost. Because the district is on a year-round schedule, classes didn’t end until June 2 and would restart on July 24, so those extra days tacked onto the end wouldn’t leave much of a summer.

For high school students, the district leased the nearby East Arkansas Community College Technology Center. Foister and Wynne High School Principal Dusty Meek worked to get the operation up and running. EACC condensed its own classes so high school students could finish their year. Juniors and seniors attended core classes Mondays, Wednesdays and Friday mornings while freshmen and sophomores had their core classes Tuesdays, Thursdays and Friday afternoons. Fridays were for mental health checks and to let students get extra help if needed. Students were allowed but not required to finish their electives. Unfortunately, career and technical education courses had to stop. The storm destroyed the agriculture building, and none of the CTE equipment could be saved.

For the students, life had to go on. On Sunday, two days after the tornado struck, Future Business Leaders

Continued on next page of America students traveled to state competition, where five qualified for nationals. Prom was held at the EACC Technology Center. Mattox, the athletic director, and Foister made sure athletics was covered. The Arkansas Activities Association provided a waiver so athletes could continue to practice and compete while school was out. The graduation ceremony was held at Arkansas State University in Jonesboro, where Gov. Sanders spoke.

One of the most heartening things about the tornado is the support the school and community have gotten from elsewhere. Moore spoke with Dr. Andy Ashley, currently the Heber Springs superintendent and formerly a high school principal at Vilonia, where the new intermediate school was destroyed by a 2014 tornado. Ashley told him that mental health should be a priority for the staff and that the district should let others help, even if help wasn’t seemingly needed, because the district doesn’t actually know what it needs. Other school districts donated buses. Administrators from other districts came with their work gloves during a high school cleanup day. FFA crews from other schools came to help with the recovery.

Arkansas State University brought a 54-foot trailer with supplies. Students in McCrory held a penny drive and raised $3,500. The Arkansas Community Foundation created a fund for donations to the Wynne School District. To donate, click on the link at the district’s website, www.wynneschools.org.

“I think short-term needs are going to be met pretty easily for people just because it’s so fresh on people’s minds,” Schlenker said. “Six months down the road when most of the volunteers have packed up and gone away and we don’t have as many donations coming in, I think that’s when you’re going to start having to use some of those funds. Because six months, say the start of school next year, somebody may not be able to go purchase school supplies or clothes for school. I think we’re still going to be left here as a community trying to pick up the pieces after volunteers are gone and donations kind of dry up coming in. Social-emotional-mental health is going to be a big piece for us moving forward.”

Mental health counselors, in fact, were available for staff members the day they were brought back to campus. The students seemed to be handling everything OK, but research has shown they can have ups and downs following a disaster, and the district wants to ensure it has resources available. Moore noted that the last kid on the bus route might see every devastated site on his way home. Lyons, the assistant superintendent, said staff members were skittish during a Sunday meeting after the storm. A major storm was forecast only days after the tornado. Schlenker noted that nurses at her hospital were fearful because they weren’t with their children.

Schlenker, a 1994 Wynne High graduate whose father, Randal Caldwell, was a 20-plus-year Wynne School Board member, has tried not only to support Moore and the staff in board meetings but also has been part of the day-to-day recovery efforts. It’s an all-hands-ondeck situation, so she is involved in ways she normally wouldn’t be. She’s tried to attend every meeting with FEMA and the state. She’s also been a liaison with the board and with the community. The day of the interview with Report Card, she had emailed Nabholz to get an updated map for FEMA. On Oliva’s advice, she contacted Dr. C.J. Huff, the former superintendent of the school district in Joplin, Missouri, that was struck in 2011. That tornado destroyed or damaged 10 of the district’s 20 buildings and killed 161 residents, including seven students and one staff member. Huff spent the first two weeks after the Wynne tornado volunteering his expertise in person. Afterwards, the board hired him on a 90-day contract for help with navigating the federal bureaucracy.

“I’m just trying to be supportive for [Moore], and anything that I can do that he doesn’t have to do, at the end of the day we still have school, and he still has to be a superintendent to 2,500 kids, and we still have to meet certain state expectations,” Schlenker said. “We’re doing testing. We still have ACT Aspire testing. Everybody has to go on with what their normal regular roles were, so for me, if I can take anything off of his plate to try to help with or navigate or call or email somebody that he doesn’t have to or Stephanie or Eric doesn’t have to, then I’m just trying to do whatever I can.”

Schlenker said school board members know the district has a long, winding road to recovery, and that changes will occur along the way. Moore said he appreciates the support she and her fellow board members have provided.

“I could not imagine how from emotional as well as just the physical side I could hold up if I didn’t have a board that was so supportive, and not meaning they just agree with everything we do, but they understand we’re trying to make decisions and we’re trying to make them sometimes in 30 minutes,” he said.

Before the tornado, the high school was already in a period of change and reflection. Last July, it had been designated by the Arkansas Department of Education as a School of Innovation, defined as one using new or creative teaching and administrative practices. The intermediate school previously had earned that designation. In January, Meek, the high school principal, had begun leading staff members in talks about the school’s future. Discussion topics included questions about what Wynne High School actually is. One question Meek asked was, what would Wynne High be if the building were gone?

“It’s just mind-boggling to think that they had just had those discussions, and then the building is technically gone,” Moore said. “And it is amazing. They’ve done exactly what he said. I mean, they’re being Wynne High School in a different building, and they’re making it work.”