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.

Cooke graduated from Eastern in 1978 and went to UNC-Greensboro, where she got bachelor's and master's degrees in deaf education and a doctorate in education. She taught hearing-impaired and gifted students in Alamance County-Burlington Schools, trained teachers in Durham, helped direct elementary instruction in Orange County and was director of magnet schools in Guilford County before becoming principal of Eastern at the beginning of the 2004 school year.

By then, some of the shine had worn off the blue and gold of her alma mater. The school had had four principals in eight years, and the students, teachers and parents sometimes wondered whether system administrators had forgotten them.

"Eastern had always kind of been looked down on," said Lohmeyer, the senior. "I'll never forget, a superintendent came out to the school one time and told a bunch of us that he didn't expect us to graduate or attend college. He said we were a bunch of country hicks. He said for us to prove him wrong, but I just remember thinking, that's not right to say something like that."

Cheryl Flinchum has three children at Eastern Guilford, one each in the ninth, 10th and 12th grades.

"We're sort of stuck out here between Guilford and Alamance counties," she said. Of the 26 high schools in the Guilford County system, "We're kind of the stepchild."

Stoking school pride

One of Cooke's first missions was to restore a little of what people around here call Wildcat Pride.

She rounded up volunteers to pick up trash. They spent weekends painting long-neglected classrooms and hallways. In the dirt in which some of their families had raised crops a generation or two ago, they planted bushes and trees.

Cooke, who stands maybe 5-foot-5 in her soft-soled, fast-moving clogs, has straight blond hair that hangs past her shoulders. She keeps a pair of reading glasses on her head and a cell phone or a walkie-talkie on her hip.

She knows the students' names. She looks at every single report card. And she does what she expects them to do -- come to school every day and lean hard into the day's chores.

"I treat them as my own children," said Cooke, whose daughter graduated from Eastern several years ago. "I respect them, fuss at them, praise and hug them. I treat them as family."

In her second month on the job, Cooke tried to break up a fight between two boys, injured her arm and went to the hospital briefly. One day, she came to school limping with one foot in nothing but a sock, the result of a snakebite.

In October, the Eastern Guilford volleyball team made it to the second round of the playoffs, the farthest they had been in years. The football team went to the playoffs last weekend. They lost, but just getting there was an accomplishment.

That the school seemed to be in the process of a turnaround made the fire seem all the more piercing. At the same time, some teachers say, it gave the students -- some of whom had taken these fleeting, formative days of high school for granted -- a sudden, poignant appreciation for what they had.

"The ones I know have always been very involved in the school," said Justin Banner, who teaches chorus and honors vocal ensemble. "But now as a whole student body, they've realized what Eastern really meant to them. This has opened their eyes and they realize, 'Wow, that was our school, our home away from home.' "

What they still had, students realized, was each other, and they meant to hold on tight. Many of them had been together since elementary school.

"We've grown through this," said Chris Kimbrell, a senior and football player. "We try to help each other out, be better friends, and we're more considerate of our community." He was one of a dozen Eastern students who spent a day while school was out sorting donated supplies into plastic tote bags so every student would have pencils and paper on the first day back in class.

Jordan Overbey noticed the change, too. Overbey is editor of the yearbook, The Catamount, part of which was overdue to be collected by the publisher when it burned up in the fire.

"Everybody's just matured really fast, I think," she said.

Interim provisions

When the school board met to discuss what to do until the school can be rebuilt -- possibly in time for the 2008-09 school year -- more than 40 Eastern students filed into the room and stood quietly along the walls until Terry Grier, the superintendent, gave them a chance to speak. Don't split us up, they said.

Administrators did the best they could; there wasn't one place big enough to hold them all. Freshmen and sophomores will attend classes in a former state school for the deaf in Browns Summit. Juniors and seniors go to a Guilford Technical Community College campus on the eastern edge of Greensboro.

In many ways, it is like the first day of school all over again: new classes, new teachers, the smell of new books.

When she has time, Cooke plans to hang a picture of the old school somewhere in the new school. It's from her office and is watermarked now from the fire hoses. She could have it restored, but she likes it that way.

It has character, like the students and faculty it represents.