Community Corner

West School's Reopening in Limbo

Building's electrical and heating systems will be relocated to higher ground.

More than four months after Hurricane Sandy barreled up the East Coast, the restoration of West School, the Long Beach School District building hit hardest in the storm, is ongoing and its reopening remains in limbo.

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“Our goal is, at the minimum, having the school available for the moving-up ceremony [in June],” Superintendent David Weiss told Patch Tuesday about the school located on Maryland Avenue. “... We may try to get the fifth grade in, if we can, but that’s still a decision that has not been made. It can’t be made until we see where we are.”

As West School continues to rebuild, the district decided to relocate the building’s electrical and heating systems that were destroyed by flooding along with everything else on the first floor in the storm. The district plans to post a bid this month for a contractor to perform the project.

“Until we have a general contractor, we won’t have a construction schedule,” Weiss said. “And obviously we’re going to be pushing them to complete the work at the earliest date, but it’s very competitive right now.”

While the district’s others schools were restored and students were able to return to classrooms weeks after the storm, the district has not yet performed any mitigation work on them.

“In the case of West School, the damage was most severe, and in the process of doing restoration it makes sense for us also to do repairs,” Weiss said.

The post-storm work at West School included asbestos abatement and restoring bathrooms that were recently rebuilt as part of a district wide preservation plan. Weiss said the district decided that it didn’t make sense to restore the electrical and heating systems to the same first-floor areas, and the plan is to move them to a mechanical room that will be created on the roof of the first floor of the two-story building.  

“We’ll put the mechanical room there so that there will be heat and electric if there were another flood,” he said.

After the storm, West School students and staff were displaced to East School. When Long Beach students returned to classrooms after the December break, they were transferred to Lindell School.

Last September, Flavia Mulligan entered her five-year-old son, Brooklyn, into kindergarten at West School at the start of the school year, but Sandy has certainly changed his experience.

“There was so much uncertainty for adults, one can only imagine what goes through a five-year-old’s mind,” Mulligan said about her son’s displacement to Lindell, which make him unable walk or ride his bike to school and miss his routine of playing in the playground at dismissal.

Brona Leddy Einstman said her son Max, also kindergarten student, has to be bussed to Lindell, making their days begin earlier and end later.

“It also saddens me that he doesn't get to play after school with his classmates, nor do I get to speak with his teacher as I would at pick up every day,” said Einstman, who doesn’t drive.

“That being said, though, the teachers have been awesome at helping the kids adjust to their new surroundings,” she added. “I just hope we will be going home to West in the fall.”

Weiss said that he and the district appreciate the resilience of West School students and staff “who have had to endure a real hardship. We understand that and we’ll work at it as best we can to get them back in as quickly as possible, but at this time we want to make sure that the school is absolutely 100 percent safe.”


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