Waverly Art Teachers Pick Up The Pieces After The Flood, And Try To Help Students Process Their Losses

When Laura Daniels woke up Saturday morning, Aug. 21, she logged onto Facebook and saw that parts of her town were flooding.

She and her husband hopped in their truck and raced to her classroom at Waverly Junior High School to try to save some of her art supplies.

“Within 11 minutes of us arriving, someone came running in the back door,” she says.

They told her the flood was already there. Their cars were floating in the parking lot, and it was too late to leave.

“The water just starts rushing in and within 30 minutes, we had gone up a ramp to a higher level of the building,” she says. “A bunch of our staff were trapped in the building for five hours.”

Art teachers in the town of Waverly are trying to pick up the pieces after the deadly flooding in August, and they are helping their students process the devastation. But that’s a challenge without access to their usual tools.

Looking back, she calls her effort to save those art supplies “kind of silly.” Her entire classroom was destroyed, and her school closed because of the damage.

“We really had no way of knowing how deep it would be,” she says. “But we endangered ourselves just for the love of — I don’t want to lose this stuff that I was going to use with my kids.”

Over at the high school, art teacher Bonnie Bentley said her most expensive loss was her kiln for pottery lessons.

But once her students returned to class, she says that seemed insignificant, especially when they say they’ve lost everything they own or that they’re living in somebody else’s house.

“I’ve had kids say, ‘But at least I’m still alive,’ ” she says.

One of Bentley’s students was swept away in the flood and died. She had just started her freshmen year of high school. Over at the middle school, a sixth-grader walked for hours to reach higher ground as the water started rising. Another student used to love drawing water. Now, she refuses.

Bentley hopes art class can help them through it.

“Art is such therapy,” she says, “to sit and let your mind let go and forget your problems.”

And eventually — when the students are ready — she says they may do an art project about the flood as a way to remember the day that altered their community forever.

Waverly’s art teachers are collecting donations and supplies to restock what they lost during the floods. You can donate here, or contribute to Bonnie Bentley’s or Laura Daniels’ classrooms.