The kids will eat lunch in the gym. The staff lounge has become a kindergarten classroom. There’s a makeshift office with three desks on the stage.

This is how Westernport Elementary has squeezed a three-story building onto its two upper floors — an intricate choreography of repairing $5 million in flood damage while reopening to more than 200 students and 50 staff members.

“The most important thing was to keep our community intact,” Allegany County Public Schools Superintendent Michael Martirano said. “I wanted a level of normalcy in a situation that was beyond normal.”

Wednesday is the first day of school at the century-old building, tucked in a valley beneath steep Western Maryland hills. The last time everyone gathered here, a sudden spring downpour filled the kindergarten and first grade classrooms with water and forced the school to evacuate by boat. Nearly 30 cars floated away from the low-lying staff parking lot.

The May 13 storm prompted Gov. Wes Moore to declare a state of emergency. The kids finished the year at a college campus 16 miles away, while the grown-ups assessed the damage to the elementary school and the town beyond it.

Nearly three months later, the ground level at Westernport Elementary remains stripped to its brick foundation, and the school is without five classrooms, a kitchen, an elevator or a boiler. Rebuilding could take another seven months, maybe longer, school officials said.

Still, reopening like this was better than the alternatives, the officials said. The school needed everyone together. And Westernport, battered by decades of decline in coal and manufacturing, needed a win.

Gradual signs of recovery are emerging across this rural town of 1,800 residents. Crews have cleaned out the mud-caked public library, patched a large hole in the public works building and repaired many gas and water lines. Though a full recovery could take years — and has been complicated by President Donald Trump’s denial of federal disaster relief funds — residents said seeing Westernport Elementary open again offered a much-needed lift.

A classroom in a library

First grade teacher Kara McDowell lost her classroom of 18 years in the flood, along with a flash drive of worksheets and a full collection of “Junie B. Jones” books. This year, she will teach a dozen 6- and 7-year-olds from a space carved out of the school library.

“We spend 20 years of our lives investing so much time and energy into our classrooms,” McDowell said, “and you don’t realize how much that really is until it’s all gone and you just don’t have it anymore.”

By the eve of back-to-school night last week, McDowell had decorated her room with a new alphabet strip, bulletin board and color guide. A set of shelves stored donated glue sticks, crayons and tissue boxes, reflecting an outpouring of community support. A yellow bin held the start of a new “Junie B. Jones” set.

“It’s definitely going to be a challenging year,” McDowell said. “The important thing is that we’re at our school. We made it through such a traumatic time together, and we’re going to make it through this year together.”

On the other side of a wall that now divides the media center, librarian Deborah Hendrickson was learning to make do with less space. She packed away artifacts she had amassed as the school’s unofficial historian, along with the library’s collection of paperbacks.

Hendrickson typically works on STEM projects with the gifted and talented students twice a week. But with limited space, some of those groups may have to meet in the hallway.

“When you start getting sad, you’ve got to just think, ‘We can do this,’” Hendrickson said. “We’re just going to have to make it work, one thing at a time.”

A guidance counselor’s office, along with the art and music rooms, are now temporary classrooms. The music instructor will teach by carrying instruments from room to room on a rolling cart. Without a kitchen, the school will truck in meals from a nearby middle school.

Hendrickson has worked full-time at the school for 38 years. She remembered the last great flood in 1996, when water rose as high as the desks and the students attended another school for six weeks. A sign on the back of Westernport Elementary still marks the waterline.

The only public school left

The elementary school is one of the few places in Westernport that has lasted.

It has stood in the same red brick building on Church Street for over 100 years, first, as a high school, and since 1958, as a place for the younger kids. Some families have sent five generations there, sharing memories of fall festivals, Christmases and graduations.

The school provides free breakfast and lunch every school day, in a community where 1 in 4 children lives in poverty, more than double the statewide rate. It sends food bags home twice a week and offers families in need coats, shoes, backpacks and hygiene products.

“This school is the heart of our little town,” secretary Shelly Fitzgerald said.

In recent decades, Westernport has lost much of what held the community together. In 1986, the town’s original high school closed for good, despite a vocal campaign by alumni to bring it back. Westernport Elementary is the only public school left in town.

Six years ago, the 131-year-old paper mill in nearby Luke also shuttered, wiping out the last traces of the area’s industrial past. Hundreds of well-paying jobs that sustained Westernport for generations vanished and never came back. The town has since lost 14% of its population, according to census data.

The May flood stoked old fears within the community. What if the damage forced the school to send kids away, and maybe even close?

Residents worried that if the school disappeared, so might what remained of Westernport.

“This community often feels like things get taken,” said Brittany Morgan, co-president of the school’s parent-teacher organization. To lose the school “would have been a big blow to the community.”

Principal Derek Horne said he heard the town’s fears, not just about the school’s future but about the waves of change and loss that have swept through the community. He said he hoped reopening would send a message: “We are here, and we’re staying.”

Watching the weather

A week before the first day of school, Westernport Elementary scrambled to get ready. A technician tested the air quality. Custodians hauled desks, trash and cardboard boxes up and down the stairs, with no elevator to help. Teachers sifted through hundreds of donated books fanned across the gym floor.

On the ground floor, crews installed the new boiler, which sent a metallic whir rattling through the school. Horne expects the work to be completed by October, in time for the year’s coldest months. The elevator, still wrapped in caution tape, should be repaired by mid-September, he said.

“Is it going to be ideal? No,” Horne said of the state of the building. “But do I think it’s going to work? Yes, I do.”

The next day, at back-to-school night for the Westernport Calico Cats, staff set up tables and canopies in the parking lot, where the flood had washed away their vehicles. As the line of kids and parents curled around the corner, the sky turned overcast. Would it rain?

Since the flood, people watch the weather closely. Many staff members now park their cars on higher ground, leaving the lot below sparsely filled. Some children are still frightened of the rain.

“Some of our students are still having trouble sleeping, or, if it rains, they get upset,” said Fitzgerald, the school secretary. “They probably just think, this time they were okay. What’s going to happen next time?”

The school, which doesn’t yet have the funds to address its drainage issues, may be quicker to close some days because of bad weather, Horne said. For now, the best solution is vigilance.

After checking in at back-to-school night, kids greeted their new teachers, who wore tie-dyed shirts, and hugged their old ones. They ate cheese and pepperoni pizza squares from Fox’s, one of the last businesses to reopen after the flood.

They took pictures with a fire truck, chased each other around the playground and received new backpacks.

For that hour, at least, the rain stayed away.