From time to time we feature guest columns from Balfour advisers. In this guest post, St. Thomas' Episcopal School adviser David Graves shares how Hurricane Harvey impacted his staff's book in 2018. This is Graves' 23rd year teaching and advising. This post originally ran in the Fall 2018 issue of Balfour's Elements magazine.
When editors Jian Liang, Miranda Graves, Auden Chang, and Tommy Wang began planning the 2018 Belltower at the St. Mark's Workshop in Dallas in June 2017, they quickly came up with a theme: "Not Just Another Day."
After two days of school, they were struggling to come up with how to deliver on that promise—things seemed pretty much like each of the 12 previous years they'd been at the school.
Then, on Sunday, Aug. 27 Hurricane Harvey—and change—arrived. Every building on campus except the upper school was under three feet of water.
For the theme, “Not Just Another Day,” the Belltower staff started their theme copy on the front endsheets and continued it on the title page and theme opening. As seen at the beginning of the book, it was like any year for the first two days. Then, the hurricane hit.
For a day or two, we thought we might have to change the theme to “Not Another Day.” But with the help of hundreds of volunteers, we cleaned out the lower and middle school classrooms we’d used for 50+ years, acquired 17 temporary buildings, moved the lower and middle schools into the upper school building and moved the upper school to a temporary campus 10 miles away.
The campus yearbook lab was undamaged, but now housed nine support staff whose offices were unusable. The yearbook staff moved four computers to our new location but had to set up the mini lab every Monday and take it down every Friday. And with a 40-person staff, we had one computer for every 10 people.
So we worked on stories, took photos (it’s a lot harder to photograph those cute little kids when they’re 10 miles away), and tried to design spreads.
The opening and subsequent spread show how devastating the hurricane was for the St. Thomas campus. The staff, along with the rest of the upper school, moved to a temporary campus 10 miles away where they had only four computers to work on the yearbook.
At first, we thought it might take a month to return to campus, but that dragged out to Christmas. We packed up and left for the break confident we would be back home. Ha! It was the end of February before our exile ended.
So, at the beginning of March, we had a cover, but zero pages submitted. It took a couple of weeks to restore our yearbook lab and get everything functioning properly.
We returned from spring break still with no pages completed. I told the staff that if they could get everything done by the end of April, I thought I could talk Balfour into getting the book printed in two weeks.
To be honest, I didn’t think there was any way the staff could finish in about four weeks, but I thought it might encourage them to get as much done as possible. And I had committed to speak at the NSPA Spring Convention, so I would be gone for four days right in the middle of those critical four weeks.
When I got back from the convention, I was stunned by how much they’d accomplished without me—and I began to believe they might actually finish. And they did: 248 pages in one month.
And Balfour did the impossible and got that book back. In fact, the help they gave us and many Harvey-impacted schools was phenomenal.
I’m still in awe over what the 2018 staff members accomplished. Over one weekend, their lives changed irrevocably. They were forced out of their homes and the school they’d attended since kindergarten. They lost access to their computers and software for months. But they told a great story and produced a stunning book.
It’s a year they’ll remember.
