After spending the bulk of the past three years in portable buildings, following the explosion of the West Fertilizer Co. plant on April 17, 2013, students in West finally have an actual school again. It opened on Monday, and the facility replaces both the middle and high schools in the town; grades 6 through 12 will be housed on the site. (The elementary school — where I was a janitor for two years after graduating high school — is near the highway, and was unaffected.)
It’s absolutely great news, and I’m happy for all the people I still know in West and the folks that work for the school. But it’s also a little bittersweet for me. I was in the first sixth-grade class that attended the middle school, and my father (the superintendent of schools at West ISD) worked for a full decade to get the high school built. Now that they’re officially replaced, it’s another thing gone.
Who cares about me, though? Life is returning to some measure of normalcy in West, and that’s what is really important.
