The staff at Bridge Elementary School built a classroom on Friday.
"We started with a blank slate of clean wax and built a classroom from scratch," said Vanessa Brown, Clendenin Elementary's principal.
The classroom - which was a cafeteria last year - will host 75 fifth-graders and three teachers.
"This is like taking a trip back to the '70s," Brown said. "This is the way we started our careers."
It's just one of the many accommodations that Brown and Bridge Principal Cynthia Cummings have had to make as they prepare the school for the upcoming school year, after floods closed Clendenin Elementary. The Clendenin school suffered damage totaling up to 97 percent of its value.
But Bridge wasn't free of flood damage either. Most of the doors in the building had to be removed. A thin sliding door is the only thing giving people privacy in the hallway bathroom. Most of the bulletin boards were removed, out of fear of mold.
The principals are asking teachers to avoid putting nametags on desks or to only use them for a little while, because they aren't sure who will show up on the first day of school.
To minimize changes, the principals tried to put kids in the same classes as their friends; Bridge students with Bridge students, Clendenin students with Clendenin students.
"Kids are very adaptable," Cummings said. "I think it will work fine.
On Monday, the day that school originally had been scheduled to begin, boxes still lined the hallways. Teachers were decorating their classrooms and sorting through the school supplies donated from several states. The school received many donated items to help them get back on track.
Come the first day of school, which will be Wednesday for these children, every student at Bridge will get a backpack filled with school supplies. They were donated by a school in New York that was affected by Hurricane Sandy.
Each student also will receive a free pair of shoes, from Dominion Virginia Power.
While class sizes have grown - some classes will have as many as 38 students - the student-teacher ratio has remained similar.
The most students per teacher will be 25-to-1.
"We're overstaffed," Brown said. "We'll have a lower student-to-teacher ratio once we get the portables."
The staff held a walk-through Monday morning for the arrival and dismissal of students. With the extra students coming in, Brown and Cummings are expecting the arrival to be hectic.
"Please ride the bus!" Cummings said.
"It's going to be a huge traffic snafu," Brown added.
The principals said parents will not be allowed to park and walk in with their children; they'll only be able to drop them off.
"You want it to be as safe as possible," Brown said.
At Elkview Middle School, which will host students from the shuttered Herbert Hoover High School, Principal Missy Lovejoy isn't as worried about traffic.
Classrooms will be used by middle-schoolers in the morning, and then high-schoolers in the afternoon, until temporary classrooms can be set up.
"There will be a few bumps and things we'll have to rein in," Lovejoy said, "but I think we've looked over every major thing and mediocre thing that could possibly come up."
Elkview still was being prepped Monday. Lovejoy said the most difficult part was moving supplies and equipment back from the storage pods, where they were being held after the flood.
But now, most of the supplies are back in their correct classrooms.
"As soon as I get that cafeteria cleaned out," Lovejoy said, "we'll be ready to go."
Reach Daniel Desrochers at dan.desrochers@wvgazettemail.com, 304-348-4886 or follow @drdesrochers on Twitter.