MORE: One of N.J.’s largest school districts delays start of school due to Ida flooding and another large district starts remote.
The Cresskill Middle/High School in Bergen County, which houses about a thousand 6th-12th graders, will likely remain closed for the remainder of the calendar year due to severe damage suffered when the remnants of Hurricane Ida smacked New Jersey, Superintendent Michael Burke said.
“There is little chance that this building is even close to being ready until 2022, at the earliest,” Burke told NJ Advance Media on Saturday.
He added the district has received permission from the New Jersey Department of Education to conduct class virtually when the school year officially starts on Wednesday. The district is actively looking for off-campus locations to serve as classrooms and would like to have “at least some grades” transition to in-person learning by November.
The Cresskill Middle/High School, located at 1 Lincoln Dr., rests on swampland less than a mile from the Tenakill Brook and is no stranger to flooding. Burke, who has worked in the district for more than 20 years, said the parking lot has always flooded a bit after heavy rainfall.
“We went through Hurricane Sandy and there were kids actually canoeing in the parking lot, but never did it enter the building,” Burke said. “That had never happened.”
On Wednesday night, Burke was receiving regular updates on the storm. He figured the school’s parking lot would flood, but he anticipated the water would recede by morning and staff could return as planned the next day.
Then he got a call around 11 p.m. The night custodian was stuck inside the middle/high school.
The Cresskill Fire Department tried to evacuate the custodian, but the water was too deep to gain access. The custodian wound up sleeping in the middle/high school gymnasium, the only part of the school that wasn’t underwater, for the night, Burke said.
When Burke finally opened the front doors to the school on Thursday morning, it was hardly recognizable.
“I knew this was something like we’ve never seen,” he said.
Every part of the building was caked in mud — classrooms, the cafeteria, the auditorium — and a visible water line at least 3 feet above the ground was evident throughout the entire school.
Setting his eyes on the initial damage, Burke knew he would have to contend with mold, repair the school’s broken HVAC equipment, and fix its destroyed boiler room. Not to mention replace all of the school’s supplies and furniture.
“Within 30 seconds to a minute I knew we had to start remote,” Burke said.
Since the middle/high school’s foundation is made of cinder and brick, the superintendent said the building’s underlying structure remained stable. Even so, the remediation process is likely to take months. Burke said he’s hoping to have at least one wing of the building cleared for use in early 2022.
In the meantime, the school district is working with town officials, including Mayor Benedict Romeo, and the local Office of Emergency Management to find suitable off-site locations for students to move into.
“We need to get these kids into an actual location quickly,” Burke said.
Once these alternative locations are finalized and the assessment of damage at Cresskill Middle/High School is complete, Burke said he will reach out to community members for donations to help outfit the temporary classrooms with furniture and supplies.
“That’s when we’ll need to mobilize the help as quickly as possible. So I’m telling the community, ‘Stay ready, it’s coming very soon,’” he said.
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Jackie Roman may be reached at jroman@njadvancemedia.com. Follow her on Twitter @jacqueroman.