Garrett Middle School thrift store aids flood victims

By Bo Emerson

The Atlanta Journal-Constitution

When Austell’s creeks overflowed and filled Clarkdale Elementary School to the ceiling during the historic September flood, Clarkdale’s students were evacuated to Garrett Middle School.

Garrett, right around the corner from Clarkdale, was having problems of its own. The Sept. 21 flood inundated its indoor play area; dozens of nearby roads were closed. While the school was dismissed at 1 p.m., many parents couldn’t get to the school to pick up their children.

About 350 students from both schools gathered in Garrett’s theater, and drama teacher Gwen Hoffey kept them entertained as day moved into night.

Many students left to find their homes destroyed; dozens stayed in shelters that night, or with family or friends. The last student left about 11 p.m.; Garrett principal F. Barrington Harris got home at 1 a.m.

Though their school was not devastated like Clarkdale, the experience galvanized Garrett, and the staff and students began working on flood relief the next day, collecting bleach (for killing mold) and garbage bags.

“My daughter Alicia and I filled our car with clothes and began driving up and down Clay Road,” Hoffey said recently. “It was her idea. We asked people ‘Do you need bags? Do you need clothes?’ Afterward she told me, ‘Mom I will never forget this the rest of my life.’ She went from the iPod generation to the
 I-help generation.”

Students at Garrett also got in on the act. Several student groups, including Umbrella of Elegance, Men of Destiny and Group X began collecting, sorting and stacking donated clothes, shoes, food, school supplies and toiletries.

Garrett’s administrators offered two vacant portable classrooms and some old tables to create a kind of thrift store where affected families could find what they needed, free of charge.

“We have had such an influx of items, and students and teachers are being so generous with donations that we have an abundance of clothing,” principal Harris said.

“You can only imagine the anguish families felt, how traumatic the experience was,” said assistant principal Tia Amlett, one of the thrift store’s organizers. “I still have children in this building, when it rains they get paranoid.”

Sixth-grade math teacher Leslie Goldman said probably 70 Garrett students and their families were either wiped out or forced to move by the flood.

Garrett is still mobilized to help flood victims rebuild. Many need winter clothes now that the weather has turned chilly. Most will have used up any school supplies given earlier. Eventually, they’ll need furniture.

Last week, Goldman stepped around stacks of boxes full of toiletries in her classroom, while administrator Bucky Horton gestured to a pile of new backpacks, donated by friends up in Bartow County where his wife teaches.

The dressing room at the theater stores containers full of writing paper, pens and pencils, and dispensers full of latex gloves. Periodically, students carry these items to the portable classrooms and invite flood victims in by appointment.

“We stayed after school, put clothes in bags and folded them up and separated them,” said Keyasia Dorce, 12. “It feels good to help.”

Renelle Cobham, 12, volunteers with Keyasia. But Renelle is also a victim, who lost most of her clothes in the flood. She remembers when people from her church took her shopping for necessities: “I started crying because I didn’t know people cared about me that much.”

Though the waters receded more than a month ago, a tour of the Austell neighborhoods around Garrett reveals dozens of houses still stripped to the studs, and yards piled with water-damaged sofas and other furnishings.

Eighth-grader Xavier Miranda, 13, thinks his home will have to be bulldozed. During the flood, as he and his father furiously moved belongings to the attic, he watched the water rise above the second floor of his house in about an hour’s time. He had to swim in to rescue his dog, Scruffles, and got bit several times in the bargain. His father found a shallow boat to help neighbors escape.

Goldman and other teachers continue to spend weekends helping homeowners in the area strip out rotten sheetrock and wash studs and joists with bleach.

“It was nasty,” said Tyler Thomas, an eighth-grader from Mableton, who helped organize the thrift store, and helped church friends dig out. “It smelled like sewage.”

Amlett said she hopes to keep the thrift store operating through the year. “I find it a blessing to be able to help somebody else.”

Those interested in helping should contact Garrett Middle School at 770-819-2466.