ELKVIEW - Micah Cutlip said spending her senior year at the new, temporary version of Herbert Hoover High - a structure of fused batches of off-white trailers surrounded by wooden walkways with red tin roofs, all lifted on stilts above the floodplain outside Elkview Middle - will be different.
"I knew where everything was at Hoover, so now I'm just like a freshman. I have to find where everything else is," Cutlip said at an open house for the new version of the school Friday, the first time she toured the place.
Monday is the start of classes for students at Hoover and most other Kanawha public schools. Kanawha school officials said they expect Hoover students will be in the roughly $10 million portable school until their planned permanent new school opens in fall 2021.
"Being here, I feel like this is Hoover again, we have our own school," Cutlip said. She said she wishes she was still in the old Hoover building, which closed after damage from June 2016 flood, "But at least it's a school. We have our own space."
Class schedules in hand, students and parents navigated the walkways connecting the roughly 40 classrooms Friday, talking with teachers and seeing the rooms, which each include large flat-screen TVs that Principal Mike Kelley said teachers can connect to their laptops.
The structure is shaped like a T, with an elongated top along Elk River Road and a line of classrooms branching off and running between Elkview Middle and a soccer field. Kelley said regular classrooms are two trailers fused together, science classrooms are basically three and the gym is four combined.
In her room, earth science teacher Heather Currie told freshman Blake Embrey, 13, the new portable school presented "an even playing field."
"The seniors don't know where they're going," Currie told him. "The juniors don't know where they're going. You're not going to stick out."
After moving from Belle, Embrey only attended Elkview Middle for two months, when that school was still hosting middle schoolers in the mornings and the Hoover students in the afternoons while the portable Hoover was still under construction.
"You go by, and you think, 'Oh my goodness,'" Christy Hughes, Embrey's mom, said of the portable school. "But it's really - it looks great. I mean they seem to really have it all together."
Currie's 3-year-old daughter, Addy, spun around on a swivel office chair Friday in Currie's new classroom.
"It feels good to have our own space and to be somewhere where we can kind of call home for a while, and I'm excited," said Currie, who's in her 11th year teaching at Hoover.
"I'm thoroughly impressed," she said of the portable school. "We have huge rooms; they're super nice. We really have everything that we need to be able to deliver the curriculum to its fullest."
"It's really different," said Garrett Cantrell, a junior this school year, "but it's nicer than I thought it was going to be."
"It's going to be weird graduating from a bunch of portables," he said, "but it's all right, I guess. There's no other option."
He and Cutlip said they enjoyed going to school in the afternoon last year and sleeping in. But they both said they expect learning will be easier with a return to full days of school.
Sydney Linville, another Hoover junior, said she lived at her dad's house last school year to attend Cabell Midland High to avoid shorter days at Hoover. Now she's back.
"It's kind of weird, like really weird," Linville said, "because I'm used to like a school, and like a huge school, with like thousands of people."
Kelley said there were about 770 students at Hoover last school year, but Linville said she feels returning to Hoover will be better because she'll be with people she's grown up with.
Several teachers expressed excitement Friday about one particular upside of the portable school.
Kanawha school buildings have for years faced air conditioning and heating issues. At the portable Hoover, teachers can control the air conditioning and heating in their own classes.
"That's one of the best things," said Kathy Silber, a 20-year Hoover educator who teaches music and film classes.
She has two classrooms, one with electric keyboards lining the walls, and a larger one with chairs on one side and, on the other side, rectangles drawn in blue tape on the floor representing risers.
She said, while her portable space is bigger than what she had at Hoover, the ceiling is too low for students to use the kind of risers her traveling, roughly 70-student competition show choir performs on, so she plans to use the risers in Elkview Middle's auditorium. A dozen trophies from last year sit atop a cabinet in her larger room.
"I heard a lot of feedback tonight from parents and students, and they were all impressed," said Sam Hicks, an English teacher in her eighth year at Hoover. "They didn't realize it'd be this big, the walkways would be nice and covered, so it's all good things."
"I heard 'wow' a lot," said Anne Endres, a Spanish and French teacher who is starting her first year teaching at Hoover. She then brought up teachers' ability to control heating and cooling.
"Which is a luxury," Endres said. "Often, another location, not even inside the school, controls that."
Hicks, who was in Endres' room talking with her, then chimed in with praise for the local temperature control. In separate rooms, Talana Harris, an Algebra I teacher in her fourth year at Hoover, and Jaelyn Merical, an English teacher in her second full year at Hoover, both brought up the air-conditioner freedom.
"I know we're only going to be here for a few years, but I'm trying to stay as positive as possible and make sure that kids, try to keep that for the kids, that same attitude," Harris said. "Honestly, I feel like I have more resources this year."
Reach Ryan Quinn at 304-348-1254
ryan.quinn@wvgazettemail.com, facebook.com/ryanedwinquinn or follow @RyanEQuinn on Twitter.