Parents' cars lined the parking lot minutes before the final bell at Hunter B. Andrews PreK-8 School on a recent afternoon.
At the center of the lot, a grassy bank slopes downward, giving way to a stretch of shrubs and marsh grass. It’s called a bioretention area.
“You can see the reeds and stuff in the area and that takes the water from the parking lots and from the roofs and stores it to slow it and release,” said Scott Smith, an engineer in Hampton’s resilience office.
City officials hope to scale up these “green infrastructure” projects as part of a new partnership to prepare schools for growing impacts from climate change.
The Hampton City Schools Resilience Partnership recently won a $558,000 grant from Virginia’s Community Flood Preparedness Fund. The city will kick in another $62,000.
Officials will assess 32 school facilities, looking for vulnerabilities to flooding, extreme heat and power outages.
The effort fits into the city’s sweeping Resilient Hampton initiative, which aims to help residents and businesses “live with water” as sea levels rise.
Resilient Hampton includes several studies, some of which identified potential projects on school sites.
“We're pretty familiar with the schools, their susceptibility to flooding,” Smith said. “So this is just a matter of putting it all together, creating another layer, which will be valuable for them for maintenance and in future planning.”
City officials said in their grant application that they hope to integrate new policies into long-term city and school operations.
“Because current policies do not fully account for watershed-based flood exposure, backup power reliability, climate-driven risks, or the need for Community Resilience Hubs, this project will establish a coordinated framework to modernize policy guidance and improve decision-making across agencies.”
That could include requirements for updating flood data, protocols for backup power and design for future facilities, the city stated.
Current funding limits the ability to fully address facility flood risks, officials wrote. The new resilience plan will allow the city and schools to pursue more grant money.
Protecting schools also helps everyone around them, Smith said.
Hampton envisions turning a handful of schools into "community resilience hubs,” places where people can go during extreme weather or power outages to get supplies, charge electronics and access heat or air conditioning.
“We recognize that schools are anchors in the community,” Smith said. “The schools are centrally located within neighborhoods and are a known place people rely on for safety.”
He said they hope to eventually involve students to teach them about resilience work and career paths.
A spokesperson for Hampton City Schools said officials are still finalizing how the partnership will work.
Hampton City Schools is a member of the Hampton Roads Educational Telecommunications Association, which holds WHRO's license.
