At height of crisis, district was helping community at large
At the Oct. 18 meeting of the Healdsburg Unified School District Board of Trustees, Superintendent Chris Vanden Heuvel outlined the activities within the district during the firestorm that ravaged Sonoma County over the previous week, including preparations for when it looked like Healdsburg might be in danger, and outreach to assist others once it appeared safe.
“We’ve all had a harrowing couple of days,” he said. “We know people, we have loved ones and friends who have lost a lot. It was scary here, even though the town weathered it. We’re going to walk through our experience and how we reacted. This was a time for us to see these emergency plans move from paper into practice.”
In the early hours of the tragedy, school staff provided assistance to the evacuation center at the community center, including meals from the district’s kitchens. However, Vanden Heuvel says he was gratified to be subsequently turned down for additional meals from the district, due to Healdsburg’s restaurant community stepping in and offering a weeks’ worth of free meals to the center.
He also said that early on, the maintenance team lead by Glen Schaezlein did a great job of getting to all the campuses and shutting down the HVAC systems so they would not be sucking in smoke and ash, and in some cases turning off the power to campuses which were potentially in the fires’ path. In addition, the district technology coordinator Chris Moghtaderi came in and started backing up the district’s servers, so if they were destroyed, staff and student information would not be lost.
The district lent its smaller bus equipped with a wheelchair lift to evacuate elderly folks on Fitch Mountain, and also lent drivers and buses to deliver supplies to evacuation centers. As the fires appeared to creep closer, all buses and drivers were staged at the high school to prepare to assist in evacuating the town.
Vanden Heuvel reported that the district had staff that had lost their homes and had “a large amount” who had been mandatorily evacuated, though final numbers were not available. As the fires turned away from Healdsburg, Vanden Heuvel and his staff made the decision to have a staff day on Monday, Oct. 16. The morning session was not mandatory, but the lunch and afternoon sessions were, and he felt it had been a very positive and important experience for the staff to prepare for opening their doors to students on Tuesday.
“We wanted to provide them a time to process and prepare to be strong for kids,” he said. “They prepped with psychologists, and worked with restorative circles and discussion groups. On Tuesday, it was good for students and staff to process; it was a good time to share stories and check in and they were informed on how to work with our kids. Folks with complete loss were here with smiles, to have some normalcy and be with our kids again.”
In addition, the district is providing free childcare for those staff members who live in areas where their own children have not been able to return to school and free counseling for any staff members who need it. They are also working with the unions to sort out the best way to offer additional leave for staff members directly impacted by the fires.
Maintenance staff completely cleaned and checked all campuses before students and staff returned, and made any repairs or cleaning to HVAC systems required. Vanden Heuvel is also doing daily monitoring of the air quality, and making determination as to whether kids will have indoor or outdoor lunch, recess and P.E.
Finally, the athletics department has been working to figure out the future schedules of the current sports, and determining which games or matches will be rescheduled and which will be outright canceled.
For football, this Friday’s game with Analy will go on as scheduled, and the game against Sonoma scheduled for the 27th had been bumped to the 28th. Cross country meets will largely be bumped forward a week, and volleyball will hold a scheduled match against Piner on Oct. 26 (originally planned for the 12th). The big change for volleyball will be the cancellation of the SCL Tournament, with no make-up date planned. Finally, the two girls’ tennis matches against Piner and Elsie Allen missed during the closure will not be rescheduled, but the match against Analy was rescheduled to Oct. 24.
“As a parent it was so great that during the whole situation you felt like someone had it under control and you felt supported and informed,” said HUSD trustee Jami Kiff. “When things felt out of control it was a presence. It made a difficult time more understandable. As a board member, I was so proud. It was so great how you availed the staff that could help.”
