Eight years after tornado, Guilford County schools still rebuilding together

The anniversary is not the same thing as the recovery

Eight years after the tornado ripped through east Greensboro, the schools that took the hardest hit are still living with its aftereffects in ordinary, day-to-day ways. Erwin Montessori, Peeler Elementary, and Hampton Elementary were damaged so severely on April 15, 2018 that they could not simply reopen as they were, and the families connected to those buildings are still working through the long tail of that storm.

What stands out now is not only the violence of the weather, but how long the rebuild has taken. The tornado was later rated an EF-2 with peak winds of about 135 mph, and it tracked about 16 miles across Guilford County before crossing into Rockingham County. At least 10 people were injured, and one person died in Greensboro when a tree fell on a vehicle. For Guilford County Schools, the disaster became an emergency that extended far beyond the first cleanup crews and the first classes held somewhere else.

How the storm changed the school system

Guilford County Schools declared a special emergency after the tornado, then moved quickly to keep classes going. Hampton Elementary students were relocated to Reedy Fork Elementary for the rest of the 2017-2018 school year. Peeler Elementary students went to Bluford Elementary, and Erwin Montessori students were sent to Alamance Elementary. Those moves kept the school year alive, but they also pushed entire communities into borrowed space and new routines with no clear end date.

The state and federal response followed in sequence. Gov. Roy Cooper requested a federal disaster declaration on April 26, 2018, and President Donald Trump approved the major disaster declaration on May 8, 2018. Later, FEMA and state assistance became available to help residents recover, and Guilford County Schools received a little more than $10 million in tornado insurance settlement money. Even with that support, district leaders said in June 2018 that the damaged schools would not reopen for the next school year, making clear that the recovery would be measured in years, not months.

Erwin Montessori: a school rebuilt through another school’s doors

Erwin Montessori’s recovery has been tied to Alamance Elementary from the start. Tiffany Taylor, who was working as a teacher assistant at Erwin at the time of the storm, remembers the silence before the tornado and the uncertainty that followed: where students and staff would go, what would happen next, and how long the disruption would last. Donations came in, supplies arrived, and Alamance Elementary opened its doors to displaced students and staff so Erwin Montessori could continue while it rebuilt.

That decision created something larger than a temporary fix. Dr. Malaina Seegars, then an exceptional children teacher in Guilford County, later served as an assistant principal at Alamance Elementary while helping support displaced Erwin students, and now leads Erwin Montessori as principal. Her path reflects how the district’s response tied schools and people together over time, creating continuity out of crisis. For a campus community that spent years away from its own building, that continuity has mattered as much as bricks and mortar.

The memory of the storm also still runs through the school in quieter ways. Many families attending Erwin Montessori now were not there in 2018, but many have siblings who were. Former fifth graders from the tornado years have returned later as graduating seniors, giving staff a chance to see the full arc of the recovery in one place.

Peeler and Hampton: loss turned into a new campus

Peeler Elementary and Hampton Elementary took a different path, but one that also shows how long rebuilding can take. The two schools have since merged into Peeler-Hampton Visual and Performing Arts Elementary, a campus that sits on the land where Peeler Open School stood before the tornado. The school is located at 2200 Randall Road in Greensboro, a site that carries both the memory of what was lost and the weight of what replaced it.

The timeline tells its own story. The Peeler-Hampton project entered design phase in November 2021, more than three years after the storm, and construction began in September 2023. That lag is the long tail of disaster recovery in plain sight: students and staff kept going, but the rebuilt campus took years to move from promise to ground breaking. What reopened was not just a school building but a reworked version of two school communities that had been forced to survive apart.

What still counts as unfinished

The unfinished part of the story is not only the physical work. It is the fact that the tornado reshaped leadership, school identity, and the emotional geography of east Greensboro. The schools that absorbed displaced students became part of the recovery itself, and the people who lived through the storm became the ones responsible for carrying those communities forward.

The cost was financial, but also human. More than $10 million in insurance money helped cover damage, and FEMA and state assistance added another layer of support. Still, the storm’s true bill includes months of displacement, a lost sense of normal at three campuses, and a districtwide reminder that a single afternoon can alter where children learn and where educators build their careers.

Eight years later, the lesson is not that recovery is over. It is that recovery can become its own institution, visible in a school principal who once taught displaced students at another campus, in siblings who carry the memory of the storm together, and in a new school building on Randall Road that stands where an older one once did. The tornado is history, but its aftermath still shapes the school day in east Greensboro.