WILMINGTON — Judy White was a two-hour car ride away when she got the call from one of her teachers at St. Anthony of Padua School early in the morning on April 23. The teacher, Jennifer Cripps, was the first one inside that morning, and when she walked in, something wasn’t right.
“She called me hysterical,” White recalled in early July. “She was standing in the lobby in an inch of water, and water was pouring out of the ceiling.”
White told Cripps to head back outside, and she would call the parish facilities staff at St. Anthony.
“You can see facilities come over on the camera carrying like, a ‘Caution: Wet floor’ sign, thinking it was a little thing. And then coming in and looking around,” White said.
It wasn’t a little thing at all. A spigot in a second-floor sink had been left open all night, and the damage was pretty extensive by the time Cripps arrived. Water penetrated the floor on the second floor, traveled throughout the ceiling on the first floor and down to the basement.
The flooding forced students and staff to leave St. Anthony of Padua School for the remainder of the school year while remediation was done and repairs begun.
The main floor and the basement, expected to be ready to go in August, needed new ceilings and floors except for the school gymnasium and cafeteria. The preschool, located in the basement, had to be torn down to the studs. Some classrooms are getting new ceilings. The administrative offices had to be redone. Many of the walls will be painted orange, the school’s color.
Total damage, White said, was about $1.2 million. The school was fortunate, she said, that it was built so solidly with marble and terrazzo that resisted damage.
“We were lucky because this building has really good bones,” she said.
Before she dug into repairs, White had a more pressing issue. What was she going to do for the remainder of the academic year with more than 200 students and staff?
That answer came quickly. Rachael Casey, the principal of St. Ann School in Wilmington, and now-retired Archmere Academy headmaster Michael Marinelli contacted Msgr. John Hopkins, pastor of St. Joseph on the Brandywine Parish. He got White on the phone and offered his campus in Greenville, about two miles from St. Anthony.
“He literally just handed over the keys and said, ‘You can start tomorrow.’ I said, ‘You might want to tell your staff first,’” White said.
White and assistant principal Brandy Miller spent a few days setting up tables and chairs in St. Joe’s parish center, which was a school decades ago, closing in 1973. By the Wednesday after the flooding, students and teachers were in their new classrooms.
Spending the last month and a half in a different setting offered the school a chance to mix things up. The students gathered outside for the morning prayer, for example.
“We started with our normal prayer and pledge, but we did it outside,” she said. They also added St. Joseph to their prayer in addition to their patrons, St. Francis de Sales and St. Francis of Assisi.
Msgr. Hopkins was the longtime pastor of St. Margaret of Scotland Parish in Newark, which shares its campus with Christ the Teacher Catholic School. He welcomed the opportunity to bring St. Anthony School to St. Joe’s, describing it as a “win-win.”
For the students and staff, they had the chance to see another church in the diocese, one totally different from their home church, Msgr. Hopkins said. His congregation felt the energy that comes with classrooms full of young people.
Msgr. Hopkins said the hardest part about moving from St. Margaret to St. Joe’s was not being around the young people at Christ the Teacher.
“It was very quiet here,” he said. “My neighbors, the people in the cemetery, they don’t talk. It’s pretty quiet. (The students) had great energy. Glad we could share the facilities with them.”
He mentioned to White that St. Joseph’s has some funerals, but the students were on their best behavior on those days.
“The parking lot became their playground. And whenever we exited church at the end of a funeral, if you looked over at the parking lots, the students, they became like statues. They just stopped in their place. Not a sound was made, and they could not have been more respectful of what was happening in the church area,” Msgr. Hopkins said.
White said the emergency brought out a spirit of togetherness among the schools in the diocese. Mary Elizabeth Muir, the principal at Holy Angels School in Newark, had a collection of supplies and delivered them to the rectory at St. Anthony’s. St. John the Beloved School donated furniture. St. Ann’s School dropped off some books. Christ the Teacher donated money to St. Anthony. The diocesan superintendent of schools, Louis De Angelo, bought lunch for the faculty.
St. Joe’s on the Brandywine added information about donating to St. Anthony’s to its parish bulletin.
Even the workers from ServPro, who were fixing the damage in the immediate aftermath of the flood, joined the effort. They collected and individually wrapped each student’s belongings, delivering them to St. Joseph on the Brandywine, White said.
“People really came together,” White said. “It was nice to see that.”
