HUDSON, Fla. — During Hurricane Helene, the West Pasco Education Academy in Hudson flooded so badly that the school had to shut down for an entire week to repair it enough for students to return.
Principal Travis Dewalt said crews have worked around the clock since Sept. 27, and the plan is to at least partially open the school back up to students on Monday, Oct. 7.
The West Pasco Education Academy is now a construction zone.
“They arrive when it’s dark, leave when it’s dark, we have teams working on top of each other on multiple pieces,” Dewalt said. “Some are doing drywall, some are doing paint — it’s the most incredible undertaking I’ve ever seen. I’m just amazed by it.”
Dewalt shared photos showing how he found the school after Hurricane Helene, with visible water lines high up the classroom walls. In his 26 years with Pasco County Schools, he said the damage caused by Helene was a first.
“I’ve never seen anything like this, and I typically work all of our storm shelters,” he said. “Administration, that’s what we do, and I always hear the stories, but this is my first time experiencing it.”
The school is less than a mile from the Gulf of Mexico, and Dewalt said the water rose more than 30 inches in some areas of the school. Since then, he said it’s been a race to recover.
“It was 24 hours after the storm we knew we were cared about,” Dewalt said. “Every district staff member you could imagine has toured my campus, day in and day out, checking on our progress, checking on the wellbeing of our people.”
He said crews are making tremendous progress. With the rebuilding being handled, Dewalt said he’s focusing on his staff, students, and their families — some of whom lost everything.
“It’s hard for us to have a bad attitude in lieu of the tragedy all around us,” he said. “So that’s the attitude we’re taking forward, and we’re just keeping everyone else in our thoughts and prayers.”
Dewalt said the school district reached out to neighboring schools and everyone is pitching in to help get them back on their feet.
“It redefines the team concept, because we all feel it,” he said. “So the big word for us is grace. Having grace with each other and grace for our students, because we don’t know what tragedy has struck them within the last couple weeks.”
Dewalt said the school administration has a phased re-entry plan. They expect to bring back half of their students to the campus on Monday, and the other half will be at a school nearby.
He said they hope to have all students back on campus within a couple of weeks.