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Illinois School Board Journal
September/October 2005

Rising from ashes after fire devastation

by Brent McArdle

Brent McArdle is superintendent of Lexington CUSD 7 in Central Illinois.

Sunday morning, June 9, 2003, I awoke to my alarm going off and my doorbell ringing. I wasn't sure which to respond to first.

Stumbling to a front window, I saw my grade school principal getting back into his car and speeding away. How odd, I thought. It was Sunday morning, and John wasn't dressed for church.

I checked my answering machine and found the answer … several harried phone calls to tell me that my high school had burned.

I dressed hurriedly and drove to Lexington High School to find firefighters, police officers, my custodial staff and many concerned bystanders walking all over the premises.

Even with more than 20 years of administrative experience, I was about to spend the next 15 months learning many new lessons about being a school administrator. Please allow me to share some of those lessons and insights in case your district is faced with a similar situation.

What do you do first? Call your insurance agent? Keep your custodians from giving tours of the building? Document the devastation? Call your architect? Get your administrative team together? Call your regional office of education?

Actually, you need to do all of the above.

Calling your insurance agent will set in motion a process to help you rebuild but also takes much of the process out of your administration's control. The relationship your superintendent/business manager develops with the representative of the insurance company is critical. Hopefully your insurance policy was well written and your policy limits were high enough to cover all your claims.

I quickly formed a bond of trust and respect with the property specialist from our carrier, and that relationship helped us through the entire year-long process. This proved important, because I was contacted by several people offering to represent the district in negotiations with the insurance company to make sure the district received fair treatment. We declined those offers and did not regret that decision.

Once the insurance company takes over the claim, many of the restraints common to school districts are eliminated. For example, since the insurance company is paying for the cleanup and restoration, bidding requirements no longer apply. The insurance company contracted another company to guide the restoration process, hire the cleanup companies and the various construction trades.

This is where your architect fits in. Depending on the damage, plans need to be developed to restore your building. Hopefully, your insurance policy was written for replacement costs for damage. Decisions need to be made to replace things as they were prior to the damage, or to make changes and updates as a part of the restoration.

Your architect will be critical in determining replacement costs and alternatives to the renovation. For example, the steel ceiling in our high school was part of the heating system. Replacement costs for the ceiling were in excess of $12 per square foot. We received replacement cost credit from the insurance company and went with a cheaper ceiling. But we were able to add air-conditioning to the building for the cost of the steel ceiling.

As we assessed the damage, an early decision had to be made about classes in the fall. It was obvious that we would not be able to start the school year in the building. Where would we house our 150 high school students and part of our junior high classes?

Our regional office of education was invaluable in helping us analyze possible community sites offered by churches and other property owners.

We were quickly able to establish that none of the sites would meet life/safety codes. We decided to explore temporary classrooms and then sites for those buildings. Once again, our regional office and architect helped analyze all the alternatives.

A separate portion of the insurance policy covered costs associated with temporary classrooms. Unfortunately, this was the one coverage that we had underestimated. Our policy coverage limit was $300,000. We exceeded that cost by approximately $50,000.

Not only did we have costs associated with leasing the building units, installing them and removing them, but we had costs for such things as decks and ramps to the buildings, bringing in additional electrical capacity, equipping the buildings with computer network access, phone lines and intercom, and fire alarms. We did not equip the temporary buildings with water or sewer access.

One of our local electricians called to alert me that we did not have enough electrical power coming into the campus with the increased demand of the temporary rooms. And by the way, the electrical service had to be paid in advance before the power company would schedule the work. Once again, once the decision is made to go with temporary buildings, assistance and cooperation with your regional office of education and local knowledgeable trades people are invaluable.

The damage to our building was mostly from smoke and soot. We have one large, extended building serving students from pre-school through high school. The main damage was contained in the high school wing.

Approximately 68,000 square feet of building had to be cleaned in addition to the renovations on the high school wing. That meant a large crew cleaning every surface while the high school was being torn apart.

We did not have to replace most of the supplies and materials in the library, gyms, storage and classrooms. We did have to replace 100 percent of everything in the high school. Our high school faculty inventoried everything from the high school wing. Everything means every text book, all teaching materials, all electronics and all the contents of each classroom and storage room.

Luckily, the loss to flames was contained to the high school office, so the faculty was able to inventory all the supplies, materials and equipment from their classrooms. The biggest problem was frugal teachers who wanted to re-use things they didn't think were "damaged enough."

For example, the high school math teacher had a gym bag with calculators she thought she "rescued." She left them in her car overnight and was amazed at the "fire" odor in her car the next day. It was not hard to convince her to purchase new calculators.

Obviously there were many other decisions and issues for our administrative team. Successfully completing the renovation and moving back into the high school the next school year took a tremendous amount of cooperation among many different groups.

We couldn't have been successful without many hours of help from the faculty and staff. Advice and cooperation from our regional office of education was invaluable. Village employees also worked closely with custodial staff and administrators. Community members took it upon themselves to raise money for the district. We had an account at our local bank that eventually reached $30,000 without any restrictions, except to make sure we took care of our students.

Coping with a disaster such as our fire cannot be done by one person: All of us together are smarter than any of us alone. Disaster plans are helpful, but many of the decisions we had to make weren't covered in our plan.

Just as with any successful district under normal circumstances, success is the result of hard work by many caring people. Our board of education, administrators, faculty and staff, architect, regional office of education, state board of education staff and knowledgeable community members all worked together to make sure our high school students' 2003-04 school year was another example of "Purple Pride."