The grown-ups tied red and black balloons around the state university. They hung banners for the little school that the children had lost. The dining hall even came up with animal crackers.

Perhaps everything could feel normal.

And so Westernport Elementary School’s summer send-off went on, only 16 miles away at big Frostburg State University. The kids had field day in the football stadium on Thursday, with third graders racing live on the jumbotron. They needed their traditions now more than ever.

The week before summer is always bittersweet. But during this one, the hugs lasted longer. The tears welled-up quicker. Some 217 children went to the century-old school squirreled away in a mountain valley of Western Maryland. They were still together, just not home.

“We’re all a little trauma-bonded,” said Ben Benson, a third-grade teacher. “It will always be ‘the year of the flood.’”

To understand, go back three weeks to the Tuesday morning in May when the rain came down so hard. Second grade teacher Ellie Bolton parked her Jetta and hurried inside. She remembers climbing the stairs past some teachers.

“Weirdly, I said to them, ‘Why do we have school? It’s pouring!’”

The town of Westernport sits in an elbow formed by the headwaters of the Potomac River. Long ago, the coal barges could reach even here, the river’s westernmost port. Upland, the 184-foot dam walls hold back the Savage River Reservoir. The mountains all around are pocked with old, flooded mines. It had been almost 30 years since the last devastating flood.

When Bolton came to teach three years ago, she puzzled over the heavy steel plates that fit over the school windows. These, she learned, were flood panels.

‘I cannot let these kids see this water’

Bolton has 18 children in her second grade class. By 8:45, they had settled into the morning reading lesson. She did not look outside.

Downstairs, first-grade teacher Kara McDowell was giving a spelling test to her 11 students. The elementary school was split-level, with her classroom partly below ground. This room had been hers for almost two decades, and she had covered its walls with greetings and bright colors. The classroom was her canvas — alphabet rug, rocking chair, all the best picture books, including her favorite out-of-print “Millie Waits for the Mail.”

The rain was coming down harder. In the parking lot, water had pooled knee-deep. Some teachers moved their cars to higher ground, but this was routine for Westernport. On the first floor, McDowell wasn’t alarmed. She had a classroom of 6- and 7-year-olds before her, anyway.

By the time lunch finished, the National Weather Service had issued a flood warning for Allegany County. The first floodwaters were reported at Westernport Elementary at 12:59 p.m. In his office, Principal Derek Horne was on the phone with the superintendent. The water was rising all around them, turning the school into an island.

The school resource officer called over the radio: The first-floor classrooms must move to the higher ground of the gym. McDowell grabbed her purse and lunch then hurried upstairs.

On the second floor, Bolton was playing “The Magic School Bus” for recess. Another teacher came in without socks or shoes; she was dripping wet. Now Bolton looked out the window. She saw a trash can floating by. How high was the water?

“I remember thinking to myself, I cannot let these kids see this water,” she said. “They would have questions or start to panic.”

The fifth grade was away on a field trip, but about 150 students remained in the building. The principal worried about putting them on buses to try to push through the floodwaters.

“The water was rising a foot every five to 10 minutes,” Horne said.

The first car floated away at 1:20 p.m. Then another, and another.

Bolton had loved her 2019 Volkswagen Jetta, which she bought with her first paychecks as a teacher. Another teacher came up to break the news.

“She said, ‘Oh, honey. I’m so sorry. Your car is gone.’ I kind of chuckled. What do you mean? You took it? She said, ‘No, honey, your car is floating away.’ That’s when my stomach dropped and tears started to fill my eyes.”

Bolton saw the school nurse coming down the hallway crying, too.

“That was the moment I realized we are in an emergency,” she said.

Within 15 minutes, according to a county schools timeline compiled later, every car in the parking lot was underwater or floating away. Some 30 of 50 Westernport employees lost their cars to the floodwaters.

By 2 p.m., Allegany County Schools had ordered early dismissal across the district. At Westernport, the floodwaters had burst into the first floor, filling McDowell’s now empty classroom with the alphabet rug and picture books.

Horne instructed all students and teachers to report to the second-floor gym. They were going to be rescued.

Escape by boat, 10 at a time

The gym windows looked onto the parking lot below. Cars were bobbing and floating past. Eerily, the waters caused the car lights to flash on and off. The car alarms were sounding.

The teachers knew they had to project calm.

“I don’t know how I did it. I guess it was adrenaline,” McDowell said. “I was cool as a cucumber. I was calm. I just told the kids, ‘We’re in this together. You’re here. I’m here. I’m not going to let anything happen to you.”

All the children wanted to look outside, of course.

“We were like, ”Nope, you don’t need to see out,’" she said.

Up Main Street, the floodwaters had blown through the doors to the town library. Muddy water was pouring into the municipal building. Some 5 inches of rain would fall that day. Later that week, Gov. Wes Moore would visit and declare a state of emergency. U.S. Rep. April McClain Delaney’s office would say the estimated damage was more than $78 million.

The town’s 1,500-gallon heating oil tank had ruptured, and teachers noticed a sheen on the water. The smell of fuel caused them to worry about a natural gas leak within the school. What if there was a fire?

“How can I make my body big enough to protect all of them?” Bolton asked herself.

From a dry embankment behind the school, Bloomington volunteer firefighter Jon Dowden weighed the hazards. The longtime firefighter was trained in swift-water rescues. Inflatable rescue boats had to cross about 150 yards of moving water to reach the landing to the second-floor doors of the school.

The way was strewn with debris, the teachers’ cars bobbing and banging together.

There were reports upriver that the water had breached the spillway of the Savage River Dam. Dowden worried the dam doors might give out. Or that some waterlogged mine would burst in the mountains above them.

“With my peripherals, I’m constantly looking,” he said. “You don’t know when the rain’s going to stop. What may be filled up and holding water back, and suddenly come loose. Unpredictable surges, unpredictable mine blowouts.”

When the boats reached the school, rescuers tossed up lifejackets. They carried off about 10 children and came back.

“I just remember looking at their sweet, little faces, saying, ”I got you. I got you," Bolton said. “Holding their hands, going down the steps, and once I got outside, handing them off to the first responders, who were standing in the water and lifting the kids into the boats.”

Back and forth, back and forth, the boats ferried children and teachers from school to dry land. Finally, there was Bolton, Horne and a handful of students left.

“You would have thought we were crossing the Nile,” she said.

‘A home to stay together’

Three weeks later, on the Frostburg campus, this was all a memory.

They had escaped, safely. Westernport’s principal and teachers tried not to dwell on the what-ifs. Still, there’s a daunting sadness about what was lost. McDowell’s classroom of two decades: Everything is gone, the alphabet rug, the primary colors on the walls — even “Millie Waits for the Mail.”

“I’m really, honestly, so tired of hearing that it’s just stuff,” she said. “For a teacher, it’s their heart and soul that went into that room, countless hours of cutting and laminating, setting up their room, organizing and filing. People don’t realize that. They don’t realize what teachers invest in a classroom.”

The Westernport “Calico Cats” couldn’t end their year three weeks early on a rescue boat. They couldn’t skip field day, the fifth-grade farewell and all their red-and-black traditions.

“We wanted a home to stay together,” Horne said.

The Children’s Literature Centre at Frostburg was a ready fit with its library of 15,000 picture books and model elementary classrooms. The center promotes childhood literacy and instructs aspiring educators.

Sarah O’Neal, the director, had a standing partnership with Westernport to bring story times to the elementary school and welcome the children to the center. Within days of the flood, Horne called her.

“I was an instant ‘yes,’” she said.

Her staff pushed off summer vacations to prepare. They hung banners reading, “Welcome Westernport.” They ordered fruit snacks and ham-and-cheese sandwiches from the dining hall. They threw a pirate-themed carnival in the basketball gym.

Frostburg’s semester was over. The campus was empty. For two weeks, The Calico Cats were big dogs, flexing like bodybuilders on a college football field, racing on wheeled chairs of a university classroom, watching “FernGully: The Last Rainforest” on the biggest projection screen ever.

Some of the children are frightened by rain now. Westernport counselor Tessa Fitzgerald invites them to talk about their fears. She assures them they are safe, the flood is over. She hopes their school year is not stamped by one scary day.

“It’s about making memories on top of that,” she said.

Back in Westernport, Megan Windle waited Thursday for the school bus to return her son and daughter from Frostburg. In the flood of 1996, she remembers escaping into the mountains for safety. Now her children worry about the river, too.

Her daughter, Taylor, was on the fifth grade field trip. But her third-grade son escaped on the rescue boat.

“I was like, ‘Ryder, were you scared?’” she said. “He said, ‘No, mommy. I was worried about you.’”

Just around the corner, disaster recovery trucks filled the parking lot at Westernport Elementary. The lawn was caked in mud. Crews were tearing out waterlogged drywall and ruined wires from the brick walls of the first floor.

Officials expect the building to reopen on time next school year. Inside, a muddy waterline still marked the height of the floodwaters, almost 7-feet.

When Taylor and Ryder rushed up, there was no talk of the river. Not now.

Ryder presented the hat that he decorated for his dad for Father’s Day. Taylor announced that she won the tug-of-war.

Tomorrow was their last day: the dunk tank. And more memories to make on top.

Banner reporter Sapna Bansil contributed to this article.