By our senior year, my class at Phil Campbell High School was used to unconventional situations when it came to the buildings we went to school in.
The tornadoes on April 27, 2011 destroyed not only our school but our entire town. As a result, we were shifted from campus to campus in the faculty’s best effort to give us the best situation possible. Once the initial shock of losing the school wore off, we all learned to make the best of what we were given and enjoyed our time as much as possible.
From the final two months of my eighth-grade year, the entire school used the Phil Campbell campus of Northwest-Shoals Community College as our school. After that, we went to school in modular buildings until my 11th-grade year. Once construction began on the new school, however, the classrooms we had used for three years were moved away to make room for our new building. This left our school in an odd situation, as the school wouldn’t be complete by the time we returned from summer break. As a result, the local churches opened their doors for us to have class.
Cramming both the senior and junior classes into one small church building was no easy feat, and doing schoolwork in a building with no desks only added to the challenge. However, as we always did, we made the best of the situation.
We all had to learn how to write using our laps as desks, and we ate the same menu each week for lunch for a month. We didn’t complain, though. We were happy to have what we did, and the vast majority of us respected the church like it was our own building. Then came the time when our school was finally built.
When we all made it to the new school in September of 2014, we were glad to have a place to call our own. Everyone seemed to have a favorite new feature of the building that spanned a vast range. Some enjoyed the new rooms, some enjoyed the new workshop for wood and metal working, and others (myself included) enjoyed the simple luxury of having lockers again. Yet with all of these new features came an odd habit surfacing amongst the younger students.
An odd occurrence that seemed to run rampant through the seventh and eighth grade during my senior year was that those two classes seemed to not appreciate or respect the new school. Where the older classes would never even think to scribble on a bathroom stall or purposely scuff the floors as a joke, the younger classes would do just that. They would go out of their way to vandalize the school for seemingly no reason. One could argue that this is just due to the immaturity of the younger kids; I think it has to do with them lacking a frame of reference for why the school was so important.
Think about it. To a young student who just entered the high school building, it must have seemed like any other building. These kids either only spent a year in the modular buildings or only spent a month in the churches before moving to the new school. I think that as a result they can’t possibly be expected to appreciate the school as much as someone who jumped around to five different campuses in his high school career.
This just goes to show how much of an impact the tornadoes had on those old enough to be affected by it. Even then, three years after the tornadoes, the older students still kept the lesson that not everything is permanent and that nothing should be taken for granted.
I think the lessons learned by my class and others affected by the tornadoes still hold true today. Five years have passed since the day we lost everything, and to this day we all remember that we have to make the best out of any situation, and that none of us are promised anything forever.
My advice is to enjoy those around you and what you are fortunate enough to have. Enjoy your life for what it is, make the most out of it, and always look forward to the future.
