Staff members from Forest Lakes Elementary in Oldsmar deliver supplies to hurricane-ravaged Bowling Green Elementary.
By THERESA BLACKWELL
Published August 31, 2004
[Times photo: Theresa Blackwell]
Sarah Adler, center, a third-grade teacher at Forest Lakes Elementary, gives a stuffed animal to Cierra Jones, 4, of Bowling Green at the Hardee County Health Department in Wauchula on Friday. Adler and two other educators dropped off baby supplies and some backpacks with games and necessities.
When Hurricane Charley missed them and hit southwest Florida, staff and students at Forest Lakes Elementary in Oldsmar felt lucky, then compelled to help other children.
So guidance counselor Stacey Rutledge and third-grade teacher Sarah Adler organized a drive. Students brought in backpacks and filled them with games, radios, books, socks, underwear and toiletries.
"I'm real excited; it's been such a fantastic turnout," Rutledge said early last week. "Our parents and students are so supportive and generous."
Rutledge knew the backpacks would go to students in an area that's impoverished even in good times. But when she and two teachers took the packs to Hardee County, they struggled to grasp the magnitude of need at the school they visited, Bowling Green Elementary.
Rutledge, Adler and fourth-grade teacher Mike Feeney left the school Friday morning. Behind their sport utility vehicle was a trailer filled with baby supplies and more than 140 backpacks. Each pack had a note to the child written by a student and a letter in Spanish from Forest Lakes Elementary.
Social service agencies for Hardee County directed most of the Forest Lakes contributions to Bowling Green Elementary. Baby supplies and some backpacks went to the Hardee County Health Department in Wauchula.
As the group traveled south from Bartow on U.S. 17, hurricane damage became evident.
Roofs were shredded or blown off. Oak trees were uprooted and pine trees snapped off. Trees were on houses or in big piles at the side of the road. Half of one mobile home was peeled back. Others were destroyed. And everywhere there was the buzz of chain saws and the smoke of burning trees and brush.
A sign on a school said, "God bless Charley's helpers."
And Bowling Green Elementary was a beehive of administrators, teachers, staff and state prison inmates, all trying to get the school ready for reopening on Monday. They had classrooms to bulldoze and foundations to pour for new portables to replace the ones lost.
"We need pictures here to show our teachers," Rutledge said. "They sometimes forget how lucky we are."
Bowling Green principal David Durastanti met the group and gave them a tour of the damaged school, starting next to the Bowling Green panther mural. There, he shared some statistics on his school. At the school's time of highest enrollment last year, during picking season:
96 percent of the students were on free or reduced-price lunches.
55 percent were migrant.
79 percent were Hispanic.
22 percent were unable to speak English.
Even with all that, the school's grade from the state moved from a D to a B last year, Durastanti's first year there. "We put the "B' in Bowling Green Elementary," his shirt proclaimed.
He said the school looked good now, two weeks after the hurricane. Downed trees and insulation had been everywhere.
"We had 10 state prisoners here and they were wonderful," Durastanti said. He said they did anything asked, including helping a woman who had locked her keys in her car.
Still, six classrooms and a reading lab were lost. A tree fell in one.
With school scheduled to open Monday, the school would make do. Classes could double up until new portables were installed.
"We are ready, baby," said assistant principal Kathy Clark. "Get 'er done, that's our motto."
Rutledge met with the school's guidance counselor, Joely Polokoff, before leaving.
Polokoff was excited about the prospect of a continuing relationship between Bowling Green and Forest Lakes elementaries. They talked about having pen pals, donations at Thanksgiving and Christmas and other possibilities.
"This is great," Polokoff said when she saw the backpacks. "How did you guys pull this together so fast?"
"We have resources," Rutledge said. "We are at a school where we're very blessed and we are happy to help."
"The children really wanted to do this," Adler said.
"Thank you so much," Polokoff said.
As the Forest Lakes Elementary group drove off toward the next dropoff, the Hardee County Health Department, they talked about Bowling Green Elementary.
"I think we have found a place that we can really help," Rutledge said.
"She's (Polokoff) willing?" Adler asked.
"Absolutely," Rutledge said. "She's worried about what her kids could do for us."
"The saddest part is that most of these people had nothing" before the storm, Adler said. How, she wondered, could they now have less than that?
