GREENSBORO - Since a fire destroyed Eastern Guilford High School on the afternoon of Nov. 1, Principal Lisa Cooke's job has been to make sure her students understand it was their roof that collapsed, not their whole world.

School resumed a week later for the displaced juniors and seniors. On the second day at the temporary location -- a community college campus in Greensboro -- a student shuffled up to the table where Cooke sat ready to make schedule changes.

"It's OK, baby," Cooke said, looking into the girl's worried face. "We'll get it worked out."

Cooke whipped the No. 2 pencil from behind her ear and a list of course offerings from a stack of papers at her right hand. It wasn't just that the Advanced Placement students who stood 50 deep before her needed their classes, so they might do well enough on the end-of-course exams to get college credit. They wanted them: U.S. history, English, statistics, environmental science.

They wanted to be with their teachers. They wanted to be with their friends. They wanted to be back to normal.

Freshman and sophomore classes are at a former state school for the deaf in the Browns Summit community north of Greensboro.

The calamity of Eastern Guilford -- the total destruction of a school building -- is rare in the modern history of public education in North Carolina, where most school fires are limited to trash cans.

This blaze, still under investigation, is thought to have started in a science lab and gone undetected for some time before a teacher spotted it and pulled an alarm. It broke out on the second floor of the main building, which had no sprinklers, and then appeared to travel through the ceiling and burn through the roof.

Students and staff were evacuated just after 2 p.m. and sent home. Later, many casually turned on their televisions to see whether the story had made the news, only to find that the school, about 60 miles west of Raleigh, was still burning despite the efforts of more than 100 firefighters. As they watched, the building caved in.

It took a few days before students and teachers began to tally the million things lost to the fire, smoke and water.

Books, class notes, coats and iPods kept in lockers.

Decades' worth of teaching materials, the sheet music library in the chorus room, the rock and mineral collection in the science department.

Musical instruments, athletes' uniforms, class projects, trophies and computers.

The mundane things such as staplers that people reach for without even thinking.

And every book in the library.

"We knew every little thing about that building," said Monique Lohmeyer, 17, a senior. "The way it smelled, the way it sounded, how hard every door slammed. Our hallways, the ones where we made memories -- that's all gone."

The school was built in 1974 near Gibsonville to serve the growing population at Guilford County's eastern edge. Thirty-two years later, the setting is still rural. Much of the rolling Piedmont landscape that surrounds the school is under cultivation. Neighboring houses are a quarter-mile apart. Directions, if you need them, often begin with the phrase, "Look for the first paved road," and there is a good chance it will be named after a church.

Although most of its students live within about 10 miles of the school, some were bused from Greensboro. At the beginning of the school year, Eastern had 967 students, 49 percent of them white, 38 percent black and 13 percent Hispanic, Asian, Native American or other races.

Lisa Cooke was in junior high school when Eastern was built. She used to ride her bike over to see how the construction was proceeding and admitted to once climbing through a window to get a better look.

Next page >