When Huff decided that Joplin’s schools would reopen on time, other educators were reeling. “We looked for our kids for a whole week,” Sachetta, the former high school principal, who is now Joplin’s superintendent, recalled. “If a kid was on Facebook and they were posting, we marked them off the list. We used every method possible. Call their parents, call a friend. ‘Have you seen Joe? Are you sure?’” Then there was the question of how to hold summer school, replace torn-up textbooks and prevent students from going to the ruined school buildings.
The students were drawn there. When Randy Steele, then a school board member, drove by the high school at night, he would see lights faintly bobbing in the dark: flashlights wielded by teenagers who might be sneaking back to look for their cheerleading uniforms or just wander the wreckage. The site was more dangerous than they knew. In the first few days after the tornado, Steele and some district employees dug through what was left of the buildings, trying to salvage sheet music, instruments, desks, anything that still looked usable. But Huff heard from his facilities director, as he put it, “Asbestos is probably everywhere.”
Tests confirmed it was. “It’s not like the government or FEMA had a SEAL-team-type, education-focused, insertion team saying, ‘Here’s what to expect,’” he said. Instead of concrete advice, he mostly received warnings, the most dire from a FEMA official who said to expect the loss of at least a third of Joplin’s school-going population as families were displaced. A Department of Education administrator said there could be up to 150 student suicides. “It scared the heck out of me,” Huff said.
He worked to set up temporary facilities all around town: The wrestling team met in a fireworks store, emptied after the Fourth of July. The heavily damaged East Middle School was relocated to an industrial building on the far edge of Joplin, with no windows and a gravel floor. It was next to a dog-food plant, “and when the wind was out of the right direction, it just did not smell good,” Huff remembered. For the temporary high school, he negotiated to use a shuttered big-box store inside a shopping mall.
In 2011, Huff, at 41, was sandy-haired and baby-faced; he peppered his speech with “awesome!” As his national profile rose, he made a useful mascot for a city bent on an inspiring turnaround. His rousing TV interviews led to more coverage, more donations. Barry Manilow donated more than $300,000 worth of instruments to Joplin’s school music programs. The United Arab Emirates gave a million dollars to buy a laptop for every child, to replace the ruined textbooks. Huff hired nine new trauma counselors, who set up “weather school,” in which meteorologists gave presentations to assuage students’ anxieties.