Nachos, Cheese, Chips and Salsa, the four pet turtles left stranded for a time at Mayfield Intermediate School are fine and will be back home in Erin Karicher’s fifth-grade classroom when school starts Sept. 7.
During February’s snow storms, weight of accumulated snow threatened to collapse the roof of the school on Signal Hill Road.
The damage to the roof was so severe that no one was allowed in the school except the engineers and fire officials, so the turtles were stranded.
Engineers found and rescued the turtles while they were inside inspecting the building and returned them to Karicher about a week after the storm.
Karicher said she’s glad to be back at Mayfield with the turtles after spending the remainder of the last school year at Manassas Assembly of God, where the school board rented space for the fifth-graders.
Mayfield’s sixth-graders went to space rented from Manassas Baptist Church at the old Marsteller Middle School.
Mayfield Principal Jeff Abt said the people at both churches bent over backwards to help the Mayfield students.
“Any time we needed something they were always there to do whatever it took to help us,” Abt told a gathering of Mayfield staff and guests at a lunch welcoming them back to the school on Friday.
Frank Weaver of William L Griffith & Co, which did the repairs, said that the roof of the building dropped five to six inches in some places with the weight of the snow.
“It was pretty extensive,” he said of the damage.
Schools superintendent Gail Pope said all expenses related to the repairs and to temporary space rental were covered by insurance.
To fix the roof, workers jacked up the roof with 52 jacks capable of lifting 8,200 pounds each, Weaver said.
They then replaced 204 bent trusses with stronger ones.
“When we startedw, the trusses were 18-gauge. The repairs that we did, we did with 14-gauge steel, so that beefed up the trusses,” he said.
Everything was then sheathed in ½-inch plywood, and Weaver said parents shouldn’t have any fears about sending their children back to school at Mayfield.
“Those braces can hold four or five times what they were originally designed to hold,” he said.
Abt told his audience that the school was probably the safest building around.
“This is where I want to be in case of another storm,” he said.
Abt thanked a raft of people who helped Mayfield teachers and students through the ordeal.
Mayfield teacher Cydny Mattia said some of the help came in little ways.
Mattia, a sixth-grade science teacher, said the hardest part was leaving 20 years worth of teaching aids in her classroom at the school.
She really missed her book collection.
“I would go to the library every other week and check out 40 or 50 books so that I had them in my classroom for my students,” she said.
If the books she checked out to her students didn’t come back in time, the folks at Central Library on Mathis Avenue cut her a break and didn’t charge late fees, she said.
“They were wonderful there,” Mattia said.
David Hargrave of William L. Griffith & Co also did his duty on animal patrol and fed the fish in three classrooms.
Hargrave taped strips of masking tape with the word “fish” on them above the doors of the classrooms to remind his staff to feed the fish when he wasn’t there.
“I had aquariums growing up and in college, and my kids had them,” Hargrave said.
“If I wasn’t here, then I would have Frank or one of our carpenters feed the fish,” Hargrave said of Weaver.
Eventually a special mission involving “authorized personnel” was sent into the building to rescue the fish, Abt said.
“We came up with a plan to get them out. It was a safe mission,” he said.
Mattia got the fish from her science class back and all but one angel fish survived, she said.
“They’ve been in my tank at home, and I’m bringing them back on Monday,” she said.
Mayfield teacher Susan Demeria said the trial brought teachers together.
“It actually brought a lot more camaraderie and cooperation between the teams,” Demeria said.
The hard part was making the students feel comfortable in their temporary quarters.
“The challenge was trying to make it seem like home,” she said.
Mayfield teacher Trace Carscadden said she was taken by the her coworkers’ improvisation.
“The thing that I continue to be surprised about is how we pooled resources collectively and off the Internet. We didn’t have any textbooks,” she said.
Orchestra teacher Brian Tessler said juggling classes between the two locations was difficult, but he and the students got through it.
“Once we kind of settled in, we just made it work,” he said. “Once you adjusted to the schedule, you made the most of what you had.”
All of the teachers said they were glad to be back at Mayfield.
“It’s great to be back together and just be a family again,” said Mayfield gym teacher Joshua Walker.
“It’s better here than anywhere else,” Karicher said.
“There’s no place like home,” Mattia said.
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