While Blackman wasn’t in Greene County at the time of the tornado, she has seen the impact it left on the school and the community.
“If not, there definitely would have been casualties,” she said.
The tornado, which was rated an EF3 on the Fujita scale, gutted the school, causing more than $16 million in damages.
After the storm passed, Lisa Grant, bookkeeper for GCMS, was one of the few staff members allowed to step back inside the school.
“There was tons of debris and glass,” she said. “Doors were blown out in the hallway. You couldn’t hardly tell where anything was. I just couldn’t believe it.”
Recovery teams were sent into the school to gather teaching materials for students, but only items deemed absolutely necessary were allowed to leave the building. Anything that couldn’t fit into a small crate was thrown away.
“I remember they called me and said, ‘I’m in your office, what do you need?’” Leigh Bright, librarian for GCMS, said. Bright was out on maternity leave when the tornado hit, and had to walk a team through what items needed to be brought out of her office.
“There was stuff I wanted to keep but wasn’t deemed necessary,” she said.
The timing of the tornado couldn’t have been much worse for the school, Bright said. End-of-grade tests were around the corner and suddenly the students had nowhere to learn.
After some searching, it was decided that the middle school would have to share facilities with Greene Central High School. Each school spent half the day in the high school building — middle school would meet in the morning and high school in the afternoon.
“We made it work, but it wasn’t like being in your school,” Grant said.
Teachers and students regularly had to ask where classrooms and materials were, and teachers had to keep all of their necessities on mobile carts, she said.
While their old school was torn down and eventually rebuilt, middle school staff and students were relegated to 10 mobile units behind their old building.
While the units weren’t ideal, the school managed to get by as their school was rebuilt.
Finally, in 2013, the new GCMS was opened. Built on the same foundation and with the layout as the old building, the school was improved, with rebar in the foundation, tornado-proofed windows and no skylights in the hallways.
Page 2 of 2 - “It’s a symbol of stability, I think,” Blackman said, “because the tornado impacted all of the county, not just the school. A lot of homes, a lot of families. To be back out of mobile units and in the classrooms, I think it’s a symbol of stability not only for students but for faculty.”
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