Five months after an earthquake damaged their schools, Louisa County students resume a normal, five-day-a-week schedule Wednesday, but many will attend class in steel-and-wood trailers — perhaps for four years.
High school and middle school students had been sharing the Louisa County Middle School, attending classes on alternate days. Elementary school students have had separate mobile classrooms since mid-September, when classes reopened three weeks after the magnitude-5.8 quake on Aug. 23.
The school day will be a half-hour longer than usual, but not as long as it was under the schedule in response to the quake. Classes had been under way for just seven days when the quake, centered in Louisa County, rattled the East Coast.
Superintendent Deborah D. Pettit said Sunday that high school students will have their lessons in clusters of mobile classrooms assembled from about 90 trailers. Trailers for elementary school students are stand-alone.
Pettit said all trailers are anchored in the ground as a precaution against tornadoes and other high winds, and were approved as safe by the county's building inspector. "They're very stable, very secure," she said.
Pettit said the elementary school will be replaced, requiring two years. Officials have not decided whether to repair the high school or build a new one. And Pettit said it could be three to four years before all students are again in permanent buildings.
Willie L. Harper, chairman of the Louisa County Board of Supervisors, and Gregory V. Strickland, head of the School Board, will officially announce the return to a five-day schedule at 1 p.m. Tuesday during a news conference and tour of the modular high school. An open house for students and their families is planned for noon to 6 p.m.
"The fact that all students will now have an educational facility, although (the high school and elementary school) are temporary, marks another step in the recovery process that the Louisa County school board and Louisa County Board of Supervisors are striving toward," the county said in a written statement.
Pettit said about 2,000 of Louisa's 4,500 students were displaced by the earthquake.
Most of them — 1,500 — were students at Louisa County High School. The building dates to 1938 and had been enlarged or modified in the 1950s, 1970s and 1980s.
An additional 550 students attended Thomas Jefferson Elementary School, built during segregation in 1958 for black students. The school was expanded in 1994.
Under the alternate-days schedule, high school students used the middle school Mondays, Wednesdays and Fridays from 8 a.m. to 4:50 p.m. Middle school students had classes Tuesdays, Thursdays and every other Saturday.
Pettit said that under the five-day schedule, middle school classes will run from 8 a.m. to 3:40 p.m.; high school classes, from 8 a.m. to 3:50 p.m. That's 30 minutes longer for both, but necessary for students to receive 990 hours of instruction required by state law.
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