Will We Be the School They Look for During a Storm?

On Monday, July 27, an EF3 tornado tore through my hometown of Menasha, Wisconsin. With winds estimated at around 140 miles per hour, the storm ripped through homes and neighborhoods, uprooted trees, brought down power lines, and transformed familiar streets into landscapes that were almost impossible to recognize. I knew none of this as it was happening.

I live in Arizona now, more than 1,800 miles away. I went through my workday completely unaware that the community where I grew up was being torn apart. I didn't learn about the tornado until I got home that evening.

My first concern was my step-daughter. She had recently purchased her first home in the area, so before anything else, I needed to know she was safe. She was, and though her new home had lost power it was undamaged. Once I knew that, I started searching.

I pulled up news stories, photos, videos, drone footage, and social media posts. I watched streets I knew become almost unrecognizable beneath fallen trees, twisted metal, shattered buildings, and debris. I scanned images trying to orient myself. I had lived in Menasha through my entire childhood, yet it was difficult to figure out what street I was looking at or what landmark used to be behind the destruction. It was shocking.

Later that evening, something about my search struck me. I hadn't looked for my childhood home. No one in my family lives in that neighborhood anymore, but that house certainly holds memories. Still, it wasn't where I instinctively went looking.

Instead, I searched for my schools. Were they okay? Were the buildings still standing? Would they continue to exist as I remembered them? That realization stayed with me longer than the images of the destruction.

Why, when confronted with pictures of my hometown devastated by a tornado, did I instinctively search for my schools? Connection? Safety? Belonging? Positive memories? Maybe all of them. And because I am an educator, eventually the personal reflection became a professional one.

Two days later, on Wednesday morning, my teachers returned to work to prepare for another school year. By then, the tornado had made national news, so the event itself wasn't new to many of them. But my connection to it was.

I carried my Menasha Blue Jays jacket into the room and held it as I told them about Monday night. I told them about my daughter. I told them about scrolling through photographs of destroyed homes and streets I barely recognized.

Then I told them what had surprised me most. I hadn't gone looking for my childhood home. I had gone looking for my schools. I could feel the emotion catching in my throat as I looked at the educators sitting in front of me and asked them: "Will we be the school that our students look for during a storm?"

Not necessarily a literal storm. When life gets hard. When they are struggling. When they are far from home. When they need to remember a time when someone believed in them. When they need something familiar to hold onto. Will it be our school that holds them?

That is not a small ask. Two years ago the answer probably would have been no. We were a school with low academic performance and high levels of violence. The beginning of our turnaround was messy. It was difficult. There were days when simply getting through the day felt like progress.

Today, we are on a very different trajectory. We have made remarkable progress, and we are continuing toward our goal of becoming an A-rated school. There are plenty of ways to measure that progress. Assessment data. Attendance. Behavior referrals. Academic growth. Proficiency rates. State letter grades.

Those things matter. They matter a lot. But holding that old Blue Jays jacket on Wednesday morning, I realized there is another measure of school turnaround. A measure that will never show up on a state dashboard.

Are we becoming the place? The place students remember. The place they search for. The place that represents safety, belonging, and connection long after they leave us.

The educators sitting in front of me that morning are part of something huge in the history of our school. They aren't simply working to raise test scores or improve a letter grade. They are rebuilding what this school means to a community. They are building the place our families can lean on. They are creating the place our students might someday look for during their own storms.

Within days, our students started showing us that it was already happening.

A week after the tornado, we held our Meet the Teacher Night. It was the largest turnout of my three years at the school. Families filled our hallways. Students found their classrooms. Parents met teachers. There was excitement and energy throughout the building as our community prepared to begin another year together.

Of course, that mattered. It was another sign that our culture continues to change. Families wanted to be in our building. They were excited to meet their children's teachers, see classrooms, and start the new year. But the biggest indicator of our success wasn't the new families coming in to meet us. It wasn't even our returning families coming back to prepare for another year. It was the students who didn't have to be there at all.

Our former students came back. Students who are now in high school walked through our doors simply because they wanted to see their former teachers. They wandered the hallways looking for familiar adults. They stopped in classrooms. They hugged teachers. They shared stories. They reconnected. There was no attendance requirement. No grade attached. No incentive. They just wanted to come back.

For a school in turnaround, there may be few measures of culture more powerful than that. Somewhere along the way, this place had become part of them.

Then, on the first day of school (just one week after I had stood in front of my teachers and asked whether we would become the school our students looked for during their storms) we received one more sign.

Around 3:00 that afternoon, a young man appeared in our front office. He wasn't one of our current students. He respectfully asked if he could come inside to say hello to a teacher. I invited him into the office. He looked at me and asked, "Do you remember me?" I did.

He had been one of our students during my first year at the school. It was the year that was truly the rough beginning of our turnaround. He was now a sophomore at the charter high school down the road.

On our first day of school, he had come back to his middle school. He wanted to see his eighth-grade ELA teacher. That teacher had experienced a difficult first year herself. Like many educators working in a school undergoing significant change, she had been learning, adjusting, struggling, growing, and trying to figure out how to reach students in an incredibly challenging environment. But she had reached this one. Maybe more than she knew.

He needed that moment. He needed to reconnect with someone who had mattered to him. She needed it too. And selfishly, so did I. We were making a difference.

Educators don't always get to see the long-term impact of their work. We plant seeds and students move on. We wonder whether the conversations mattered. Whether the encouragement stuck. Whether they knew how much we cared. Whether they will remember us.

That afternoon, she didn't have to wonder. He came back.

School turnaround demands data. It should. We have an obligation to improve academic outcomes for students, and I will never minimize the importance of that work. But there are things happening inside a school that no dashboard can fully capture.

A former student walking through the doors just to see a teacher. A high school student wandering a middle school hallway because it still feels familiar. A family choosing to spend an evening inside the school because they are excited about the year ahead. A student remembering an adult who once made him feel seen.

Those moments won't add points to our state letter grade, but they tell us something incredibly important about whether the turnaround is working. We are not simply trying to create a school where students perform better. We are trying to create a school worth remembering.

I still find it remarkable that after seeing those first images of Menasha, I didn't search for my childhood house. I searched for my schools. Decades later and thousands of miles away, those buildings still represented something to me. Connection. Belonging. Memory. Safety. Home.

Maybe that is one of the greatest responsibilities we carry as educators.

Our students spend years inside our buildings. They walk our hallways thousands of times. They sit in our classrooms. They struggle here. They succeed here. They laugh here. They make mistakes here. They build friendships here. They discover pieces of who they are here.

Someday, they will leave. Life will happen. There will be storms. Some literal, but most not.

Perhaps the real question isn't simply whether they will remember what we taught them. Maybe it is whether they will remember how this place made them feel. Will they remember the adults who believed in them? Will they come back when they need connection? When the landscape of their lives becomes unfamiliar, will there be something about this place that still feels like home? Will they look for us during the storm?

During a turnaround, we take every sign of progress as it comes. We celebrate academic growth. We celebrate an improved letter grade. We celebrate a packed Meet the Teacher Night. We let our successes become the noise we shout out into the world.

We also pay attention to the things that won't appear in a spreadsheet. We pay attention to the former students wandering our halls looking for their teachers. We pay attention to the hugs. We pay attention to the young man standing in our front office at 3:00 on the first day of school asking if he can see the teacher who mattered to him. That is the turnaround too.

Becoming a great school isn't only about becoming the place where students succeed. It's about becoming the place they carry with them when they leave, and the place they look for when the storm comes.