It has been a year and a half since Tropical Storm Harvey flooded much of Orange County. One of the hardest hit areas in the county was Orangefield.
Flooding from Harvey damaged all three of the Orangefield Independent School District campuses. Superintendent Dr. Stephen Patterson said the Orangefield schools have rebounded well in the twenty months since Harvey.
The superintendent believes the district is 98 to 99 percent complete with the restoration of the buildings especially the Orangefield Elementary School which was the most seriously damaged of the three schools. He indicated a few doors need to be installed and a few cabinets have not been received.
Now the process is down to recovering the funds from FEMA to help pay for the restoration. All the paperwork has been processed by the district. Patterson replied, “It’s just a matter of that working through their system which as you know is not always fast.”
Enrollment in the Orangefield schools actually went up just prior to the storm. Dr. Patterson updated the current enrollment numbers in the district. “We did not lose any students through this. If you look at where we were pre-Harvey to where we are now then we are up, but in comparison to last year it’s exactly the almost identical number,” Patterson concluded.
The Orangefield School Board has a meeting scheduled for Monday evening to consider hiring personnel for the district. The meeting will mostly be done in a closed door session beginning at 6:30 PM in the Orangefield Administration Building on FM 105.
-Dan Perrine, KOGT-
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