Dry rot found at Berkeley middle school forces classes to relocate for start of new school year

Wednesday marked the start of a new chapter for 450 students at Longfellow Middle School after a bit of a manic summer.

"Vacations were cancelled, plans were put on hold but this is what we do," Enikia Ford Morthel, Superintendent of the Berkeley Unified School District said.

Instead of returning to their usual campus in Berkeley, they're starting the school year about a mile and a half away at Berkeley Adult School.

Construction workers discovered dry rot at Longfellow over the summer.

"Everyone was really surprised because it was supposed to just be a remodel that was going to be done in time for today," Lindsey Urbina, a neighbor said.

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Superintendent Enikia Ford Morthel says the building had to be red tagged.

"During that modernization process, they broke into one of the walls and discovered something and looked even closer and said it's not just in this one section, it's actually throughout," Morthel said. "It wasn't anything that we could have foresaw."

But in just two months, the district quickly pivoted, moving everything into the adult school campus and moving more than a thousand adult school students to other sites in the district.

"Luckily we had and have this site," she said. "And all the programming, things that were happening at the original Longfellow campus will continue here."

From their own gated parking lot, to hallways filled with natural light and no more shared classrooms, teachers say this has actually been an upgrade.

"All teachers have their own classroom which is huge for teachers and the classrooms are bigger," Gretchen Montoya, a Spanish teacher said. "The space is enormous, I never knew that the Berkeley Adult School had this much to offer, I'm actually really impressed."

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Montoya has taught at Longfellow for the past 17 years.

She says crews packed up each classroom over the summer and hand-delivered the boxes to the adult school.

"The biggest challenge for us was to come into these rooms and find an enormous pile of boxes and sift through all of that," she said.

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After seven days of unpacking, it looks like she's been there all 17 years.

"What we know about schools is that the building is not the school, it's the people that make up the school that actually make the school a community," Morthel said.

The district says they're not expecting to be back at their original Longfellow Middle School site for at least the next two years.

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