Students return to classes at Blanchard Elementary

A playground that stood empty and quiet for almost eight weeks came back to life Monday with the sounds of children playing. Blanchard Elementary students returned home on an unseasonably warm January day after attending classes at a local church since a December fire at the school.

Students and staff gathered in the school's gym first thing and were addressed with a welcome-back message from Cape Girardeau School District superintendent Dr. Jim Welker, principal Dr. Barbara Kohlfeld and school resource officer Luther Bonds.

Sunday, staff went to services at Lynwood Baptist Church and thanked the congregation for opening its doors to the students, Kohlfeld said.

"We are so glad to be home, but we owe them a debt of gratitude we can never repay," she said.

The district chose to hold classes at the church because of the available space and food service setup.

The fire Dec. 6 began in a teacher workroom and damaged several adjoining rooms and hallways. Two rooms that sustained fire damage are still being repaired, and several rooms where classes normally happen are still empty. In the meantime some classes are in the rooms normally reserved for supplemental instruction.

Restoration work is continuing Monday, Jan. 30, 2012 in the teachers' workroom where a fire started Dec. 6 at Blanchard Elementary School. An idle copier overheating may have caused the blaze. The official cause is listed as undetermined. (Fred Lynch)

The area in the eastern cross hallway of the school damaged by the fire is accessible to students and staff, apart from the two rooms that sustained fire damage. Workers were filling walls with insulation and hanging drywall Monday morning just down the hall from where students lined up for lunch. Other areas of the school show no evidence of the fire, apart from several classrooms near the cross hallway where furniture and other items remain sparse.

A volunteer-run tutoring program, Read to Succeed, should restart within a few weeks when the classrooms are ready to be occupied, Kohlfeld said. My Sidewalks, a supplemental reading program administered by teachers, should also resume, she said. Those programs were suspended while students were out of the building.

Kohlfeld said that although the move affected students somewhat, she doesn't anticipate their academic achievement will suffer.

"When things like this happen, you just have to develop and plan and go on," she said.

The school will have to reorder some supplies that were damaged in the fire, such as booklets that go with the My Sidewalks program.

Something else the students missed while out of their normal environment was the technology they and teachers are used to having, Kohlfeld said. In classrooms at the school, teachers often rely on smartboards. While at the church, teachers did have access to laptops, which were on loan from Central High School.

For first-grade teacher Scarlet Winans and her students, the return to Blanchard felt like coming home for the first time.

"We were all really excited," Winans said after school Monday. "The kids kept saying the school and their room was bigger and better. They forgot that nothing has really changed. But their perspective was like that it was a whole new building."

Winans' room, just south of the cross hallway where the teacher workroom caught fire, was damaged by smoke, and most of the items inside had to be thrown away.

Winans and some of her family members spent several hours Thursday night redecorating the room.

"I went with the flameproof polka dots and flameproof fringe," she said.

Open house planned

Teachers will be meeting in the coming weeks to plan an open house for families and the community to coincide with the timing of parent/teacher conferences that will show how the school is recovering from the fire, Winans said.

Blanchard's Parent Teacher Organization is getting back on its feet as well after planning materials, financial files and items donated for a holiday store for students were lost in the fire. The holiday store, where students could buy gifts for parents or family members with points they earned for good behavior, was replenished with donations from the community and held at the church two weeks following the fire.

When repairs at the school are finished, the PTO is hopeful it will regain storage space in the teacher workroom where the fire began, said Melissa Duncan, treasurer of the PTO. For now, she and other members of the organization have some items stored in their homes or work offices. The PTO will hold a chili supper March 4 to raise money for student field trips.

Administrative services director Neil Glass said that work should be completed in three weeks. While students were out, construction crews also added an extra set of doors to the school's entryway and reconfigured the setup of the main office to increase safety. That work is part of the district's $40 million improvement projects approved by voters in 2010. It was not scheduled to be done until the summer, but the district pushed the work forward since the building was empty for a time.

The official cause of the fire is listed as undetermined by the state fire marshal's office and is no longer under investigation, Glass said. The total dollar amount related to the fire, including damage repair and disruption of services such as transportation, is north of $1 million. The district and its insurance company should have an exact figure sometime in the next few weeks, he said.

eragan@semissourian.com

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