Texas Hill Country had over a month until its young students were scheduled to go back to school. But after devastating floods swept through the region on July 4, Kerr County schools opened their doors early to welcome emergency responders and muddy volunteers pouring into rural Texas.
In the small Hunt Independent School District, a science lab that typically hosted students working on class experiments became a break room, outfitted with a microwave and shelves of beef jerky and coffee. Staff set up dozens of cots in classrooms throughout the district’s buildings and even provided garment bags, later collecting them to wash first responders’ laundry in the school gym.
Outside, the basketball court was crowded with generators and air-conditioned tents for overflow responders to sleep in.
Mercy Chefs and World Central Kitchen delivered chef-prepared dinners to the school, where rescue teams spent weeks eating meals in between their tireless search and recovery efforts.
“It was a full-scale housing operation,” Hunt Superintendent Luci Harmon said.
When disasters strike and roads are washed out, schools often become the backbone of relief, offering shelter, food and a place to regroup.
Within days of the Guadalupe River flooding, hundreds of first responders and volunteers were sheltering on various school campuses as they combed Kerr County for survivors. At least 135 people, including more than 35 children, were killed in the catastrophic Central Texas flooding.
Among the victims are two of Hunt’s youngest students. In nearby Kerrville, a beloved teacher and coach, along with his whole family, were also killed.
Hill County students are returning to school this week and will find little sign of the transformation their campuses went through, administrators say. However, the emotional scars from a summer of frightening water rescues and devastating loss loom.
But local educators say they are determined to help students heal and bring joy back to them.
“I believe our classrooms truly do provide that beacon of hope and resiliency,” said Kerrville Independent School District Superintendent Brent Ringo.
“Our goal is to make this the best year yet,” he added.
Schools were ‘home’ to responders
Three small buildings make up the Hunt Independent School District in Hunt, Texas, serving about 200 students from pre-K to 8th grade. The district has operated there for nearly a century after moving from a more flood-prone area of town in 1926.
“They perfectly chose the new spot,” Harmon, the superintendent, said.
In just three hours on July 4, around 6.5 inches of torrential rain pummeled Hunt, Texas — a 1-in-100-year event. But the only flood damage to the school grounds was to playground equipment and asphalt, she said.
But Camp La Junta, the town’s idyllic boys’ camp half a mile away, was overrun by treacherous floodwaters. And at nearby Camp Mystic, an all-girls Christian summer camp, an entire cabin was swept away, and many young campers — including 8-year-old Hunt student Renee Smajstrla — were killed.
Hunt’s resilience in the face of record-breaking flooding turned the campus into a refuge for the summer.
Volunteers spent long nights huddled around small purple and orange lunch tables with laptops, launching disaster response efforts from Hunt’s cafeteria. Photos show printed weather forecasts, maps and work orders plastering the walls.
Houston firefighter Tyler Graf said having a dry bed and sense of community at the Hunt School made him and his search-and-rescue K9 Truckie more resilient in their search for survivors.
“It wasn’t just a work site to quickly rest your head and get back to work; it was somewhere else you could go and let your guard down for a few hours,” he said.
Volunteers would give Truckie scraps of food and hugs when they “came home every day to the school,” Graf said.
School staff was on site each day, making sure responders had what they needed while also preparing for the new school year.
“The school was super gracious in the middle of their own grief,” said Oscar Arauco, a volunteer with emergency recovery group Team Rubicon, which stayed on Hunt’s campus.
“They always had an impending deadline of school starting,” Arauco said, so his team helped clean up campus before they left.
Nearly two months after the flooding, Hunt is still without a working phone system, but Harmon says that’s the only lingering change from the summer. The campus and its teachers are ready for students.
“We’ve all had this shared traumatic event that we’ve been through, and it’s deepened our relationships,” she said. “It is definitely going to be the most special year these kids have ever encountered.”
‘Honored and humbled’ to house responders at school
In Kerrville, the Guadalupe River rose more than 30 feet in just an hour the morning of Independence Day, water gauges show. Floodwaters inundated homes and businesses, overturning furniture and coating walls in mud.
With a campground still flooded and 400 campers needing transportation that evening, Camp La Junta owner and Kerrville Public School Foundation Board member Katie Fineske called Ringo, the Kerrville district superintendent, for help.
“My camp is devastated — it’s gone,” Fineske said.
“Buildings are gone and we have no power. Can you get us out of here?” she asked him.
Within minutes, a state trooper was escorting ten school buses through debris to the camp, Ringo said. Among the drivers were Kerrville principals, teachers and coaches. Aubrey Pruitt, a teacher and coach in the district, had earned her commercial driver’s license just one week earlier, transporting children by bus for the first time on July 4.
Everyone at Camp La Junta was safe and accounted for, the camp later announced.
More school buses were later sent to Hunt to rescue hundreds at Camp Mystic. Local educators ushered the young survivors from camp into the arms of their parents.
“When they saw the girls get off our buses, just the emotion of that, just to know we could support our camps and help at a time of need, we were honored,” Ringo said.
The Kerrville district threw all available resources into flood relief from the start, even as grief swept through its schools. Reece Zunker, a teacher and soccer coach at Kerrville’s Tivy High School, was killed in the flooding along with his wife and kids. His son, 7-year-old Lyle Zunker, was a student at the Hunt School.
The Tivy campus persevered through the loss, spared from floodwaters, and transformed into a home for 90 game wardens from the Texas Department of Emergency Management, Ringo said.
Between tireless searches for survivors and cleanup work, the wardens pushed aside desks to make room for cots in classrooms and showered in bare locker rooms.
Hal Peterson Middle School, the 200,000-square-foot school across the street, housed more than 250 first responders, Ringo said. They were able to use the school’s amenities, like ping pong, in their downtime.
“We gave them space to sleep, have their briefing meetings at 6 a.m., 6 p.m. every day, take a shower, just relax,” Ringo said. “We were honored and humbled just to … become a site for the first responders to come in and support our community through all this.”
Teaching after devastating loss
The flood tied together the grief of not only the Hunt and Kerrville school districts, but of all Central Texas. Teachers across Hill Country have been preparing for students whose lives were reshaped by the floodwaters.
Harmon says her first priority since the disaster began has been the well-being of families in Hunt.
After the flooding, “the principal and I sat down and we called every single parent,” she said. Within hours, they knew which families needed support, allocating food, clothing, counseling or other help. School counselor Verlene Wallace reached out to every affected student, providing support through the summer.
While no currently enrolled Kerville students were killed, former students were among the victims, Ringo said, and more than 60 district families were directly affected.
“We know our students are coming in with some pretty heavy trauma at very young ages and they don’t necessarily know how to talk about it,” Ringo said.
To meet that need, both districts have expanded mental health resources this year, including around-the-clock counseling access, therapy dogs on campus, more community events and free school supplies for all 4,600 Kerrville district students.
Ringo said the district has adopted Reece Zunker’s longtime coaching motto, “You’ll never walk alone,” as a guiding promise to the community.
“We’ve been saying that to each employee, each student, each parent who has come in for assistance,” he said.
“We’re gonna get through this year together one day at a time.”
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