Water filtration system to help Asheville City Schools return to regular school hours

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    ASHEVILLE, North Carolina (WLOS) — Asheville City Schools resumed classes on the morning of Monday, Oct. 28, just over a month since Helene hit the area.

Superintendent Maggie Fehrman said that there were a lot of mixed emotions on the first day back.

“There’s been joy, students getting back into the building, seeing their teachers lots of happiness. Then as we started talking with our students, there’s some sadness,” she said.

She said that for students who have lost family members or have damaged homes, it is a very hard time.

It was a community-wide tragedy and schools provide a safe space for our students so as soon as we could get back, that’s what we wanted to do,” she said. She added that it is important for students to have a community to be able to process this last month.

But, the biggest barrier to getting kids back in school has been water.

Originally, Ferman said the school system wanted to get enough bottled water for every student to have at least a liter of water for a four-hour day.

“When we started calculating the number of pallets for the high school alone, it would be 30 pallets of water,” she said.

Luckily, she said they were able to connect with the nonprofit organization called Water Mission, which sets up water resources in devastated areas.

“We were able to put four of their filtration systems on different campuses so that our students will be able to refill water bottles instead of having to use plastic water bottles,” she said.

The locations include Asheville High School, Asheville Middle School, and Isaac Dickson and Claxton Elementary Schools.

Fehrman said that with this filtration system, they are now able to process 10,000 gallons of water a day. This is more than they need, but is plenty enough to open all of their campuses for a full day.

Tiger Norman, Asheville High School assistant principal, explained how the water filtration system will work.

It filters out the water that Asheville City is pumping to our campus, and so it goes through a whole process here that once it filters out the chlorine and all the other bad things that’s in the water, we get to drop them into these 250-gallon jugs full of drinkable water,” he said. Norman said that this allows their students to have plenty of water to drink throughout the day, and that the system will be able to be in place for as long as necessary.

For Monday, the school system relied solely on bottled waters to have their district open for a modified four-hour day.

Norman said that the filtration system should be ready to go by Wednesday, Oct. 30 to allow for normal school hours.

The district will run on a modified schedule for one more day, with elementary schools running from 9 a.m. to 1 p.m. and secondary schools will run from 10 a.m. to 2 p.m. on Tuesday, Oct. 29.

On Wednesday, the district will resume normal operations that includes all after school programs and sports.

Students coming up and telling me how grateful they are to be back just really makes everything worth it,” Fehrman said. ACS is still operating their resource center at 90 Montford Avenue, where supply distribution and donations are taking place from 12 p.m. to 5 p.m.

Fehrman says they are still in need of donations for washcloths, towels and basic clean up supplies.

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