February 15th... the Fire

As I said in an earlier post our school burned down. The image on the right shows the gym with the high school going up in flames. The fire department worked very hard and kept the fire fronm spreading to the gymnasium. We had clay murals that the students had made a number of years ago on the outside which depicted the four seasons of White Mountain. We pawed around in the frozen ash and searched in the rubble. We were able to find a lot of the pieces and are trying to put it back together. It is like a jig saw puzzle.


To the left you see the roofline and attic right where the furnace was. The image below shows the left side of our high school... the fire started in the attic and progressed from there. The cause of the fire was not truly identified but thought to of been a furnace gone awry.

It was about 6:30 am and a large number of residents, adults and students, had woken up and gathered as the fire raged on.

We had a plane load of folks from the District Office arrive about 10:30 am and by that time the fire was only smoldering ruins.


















The losses that we dealt with were large: we not only lost our classroom space but the majority of our school supplies were in the attic: our sports uniforms (xc running, volleyball, cheerleading, wrestling, boys basketball, xc skiing, native youth olympics, camping gear, etc...) and ski were stored in the attic, texts for curriculum taught every other year, science equipment, school records for past graduates, and art supplies to name a bit. In addition to that were all the personal items that the students had in their lockers as well as all of our personal teaching resources and the school records in the office. The spring was spent not only teaching our current classes but also spent ordering replacement materials. What we have now are three buildings that we are using as 2 high school classrooms and the jr high classroom.