D.C. Everest Greenheck Turner Community Center - Photo by MWC's Tom Schumacher
CONLEY COMMENTARY (WSAU) – If you’ve never been inside the Greentuck Turner fieldhouse at D.C. Everest, you should. It is – huge. It has a big, tall ceiling. Four athletic fields with artificial turf. It has locker rooms, conference rooms, simulator rooms (the golf simulator is particularly popular this time of year.). It also have viewing decks for spectators and open areas with small tables.
It would be hard not to be impressed by such a facility. It’s also not designed for classroom space.
Yet that’s what it will be used for for the foreseeable future.
Riverside Elementary School was damaged during last Friday’s tornado. The school building will be repaired, but it’s unusable right now. Riverside students will go to class at the Greenheck Turner fieldhouse. Parts of the fieldhouse were turned into classroom space on Monday and Tuesday. Classes were held there yesterday.
Aside from their ABCs and arithmetic, there’s a great lesson in all of this for Riverside students. Im sure going to a new place which isn’t designed as a school is a challenge. The lesson is that life never unfolds exactly the way we expect it to. Sometimes tornadoes strike. Sometimes your school gets moved to an unfamiliar place.
The students will probably remember going to class at the fieldhouse forever. Yet these are grade-school kids. In the years ahead they’ll attend middle school and high school. And I’m sure no one’s overall education will be harmed by a month or so of learning at an unusual location.
There’s a lesson for the rest of us too. Certainly some of the students lived in homes that were also damaged by the tornado. Yet, they are young people. Their families may have lost all their “stuff” – but they’re alive and are safe now. What impact will a destroyed home have on their lives? Most likely, they’ll rebuild. Over the course of time, they’ll be changed, but will be alright.
The lesson, for all of us, is adaptability. Even life’s tragedies – a divorce, a parent’s untimely death, financial losses – are seldom unrecoverable. We may be different, but yet we continue on.
Chris Conley
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