YABUCOA, Puerto Rico _ Felipe Velazquez and his 11-year-old daughter, Genesis, stood side by side and watched the men dismantle the school _ chair by chair, desk by desk, 100 years of small-town boricua history slowly being stacked into the back of a truck.
The men didn't seem to notice the school uniforms _ dirt-stained polo shirts and child-sized pinafores _ tacked on the fence and flapping in the breeze, with pleas printed on them in crooked black marker: "I love my little school. Please don't close it."
But it was too late. The candlelight vigils, the protests, the prayers, the trip to the Department of Education in San Juan _ none of it had been enough to save Marcos Sanchez K-8 Center. With three days left before the start of the new school year, families in the mountains above the town of Yabucoa were preparing to send their children to new schools miles away. Hurricane Maria was exacting yet another toll on the people of Puerto Rico.
The Category 4 hurricane made landfall in this southeastern corner of the island on Sept. 20, 2017,, unleashing ferocious winds of up to 135 mph that ripped the roofs from homes, upended cars and wiped out fields of crops. Afterward, residents spent months without power, often with little more than a blue tarp over their heads to keep out the rain.
But even long stretches of time without electricity hadn't hurt the way this did. Seven months after the storm, as the island struggled to rise from its knees, residents in the mountains above Yabucoa learned that the heart of their community _ the school _ was among 250 campuses the government planned to close. And though the official reasons were the island's crippling debt and the exodus of thousands of families, problems that had existed before the hurricane, the final blow had been dealt by Maria. A school built to hold 500 children had been reduced to serving fewer than 100.
"The world ended for us," said Velazquez, describing the moment when he'd learned that Marcos Sanchez was closing.
"This school has been here for 100 years, and important, important people have come out of this school," he added, listing mayors, legislators and other officials who had attended classes in the white and turquoise building. Like most of his neighbors, Velazquez had gone to Marcos Sanchez as a child and for the last eight years had sent his daughter there, too.
Now Genesis and her classmates _ children she'd known since preschool who seemed like the siblings she'd never had _ would be scattered to different schools, a separation that Genesis said made her feel "really bad."
There would also be no bus to take her to the new school, it turned out. That's because she had been slated to go to a different school in a neighborhood known for drug dealing, but Velazquez and several neighbors had transferred their children to Rosa Costa Valdivieso Middle School in a safer area.
A neighbor, Alba Gomez, who joined Genesis and Velazquez watching their old school turn into a shell, said she was worried about paying for the extra gas it would take to get her son to class. A single mom with three kids, Gomez survived on $484 a month in child support and whatever she could make selling stews and frituras, fried snacks.
And it wasn't just the lack of transportation that made Gomez uneasy. At Marcos Sanchez, she knew she could count on her neighbors in an emergency. The businesses across the street also kept a watchful eye on the kids. The pizza parlor and bakery fed the students when they were hungry and let parents pay later.
Although the new school was only a 20-minute car ride away, it was across the Guayanes River, which flooded after heavy rains, sometimes isolating Gomez and her neighbors for hours. And the new school was in the town center, which felt like a different world. While Yabucoa was limping along a year after the hurricane, it was still a bustling place compared to this area in the mountains, known as Guayabota, where tiny cement homes nestled between fields of yams and plantains, and Marcos Sanchez was the centerpiece of the community.
"I felt safe here because I was born here, I was raised here, I studied here," Gomez said, standing on the patio outside a kindergarten classroom whose outer wall was decorated with a mural of small handprints in the form of a tree.
"Now they have my kids far away. In an emergency ... I'm not going to arrive in time," she said.
The neighborhood's only remaining hope was a lawsuit the families had filed against the Department of Education in May _ one of several suits brought by communities across the island to challenge dozens of school closures.
A court in San Juan had dismissed the lawsuit in July, but the families were appealing the decision and Velazquez remained optimistic about their chances of winning _ if not in time for this year, maybe the next. After all, the school served as a community center and polling place for the entire neighborhood. "This school brought together the core of the community," he said. "It was the only thing here to unite the community. The only thing."
