Mounds of kindergarten toys junked up the hallway. Student work wilted on the damp walls. Tubs that once contained building blocks now contained seawater. The large Lego sign that weeks earlier had welcomed the Gulf Beaches Elementary Sharks to their first day of school now read “WE OME SHA S.”
But it was the plastic flamingos that most struck Principal Robert Kalach.
When Hurricane Helene pushed the ocean through the school’s St. Pete Beach island neighborhood, it lifted a flock of the lawn decorations from a neighbor’s yard and deposited them on campus. When Kalach arrived by police escort after the storm to gauge its toll, he found them lying there, hot pink symbols of both the disaster and the Floridian community it had wrecked…