There was always something about my high school that made it stand out from other schools. We didn’t have the highest test scores, the richest students, the best athletic programs, or even the newest school building. There was just something that made me want to get up and go to school, no matter how much I just wanted to get breakfast and skip Spanish.

I have friends who graduated before me and say “there is no place like Hoover,” but I never believed them. We are just another high school, with another ordinary football team, another principal who set the bar high when it came to test scores, and another school with another teacher that everyone hated but loved at the same time. I had always thought we were just ordinary until one day, something happened.

This past June something happened in our little town that rocked everyone’s worlds. There was a flood, and yeah we live on a river and there have been floods before and the water has gotten high, but never this high. My house was flooded, and so was everything else in Clendenin. And when I say everything, I mean EVERYTHING. The town was destroyed, it made the national news, and none of us even knew because we were oblivious due to our situation.

In between our little island of Clendenin and the town of Elkview there is a high school unlike any other, well at least in my opinion. Its name is Herbert Hoover High School and it is the pride of the Elk River. I grew up begging my mom to take me to football games on Friday nights and let me watch the Huskies, knowing I would be one of them one day, but I never knew what it meant to be a Husky until I got to be one.

Hoover is different because you don’t walk in at 7 a.m. and see a bunch of kids keeping to themselves. You see crowds of kids talking to one another and catching up on what happened that weekend in the commons, you see the kids waiting for the carver bus outside no matter how cold it is, you see kids reading in the hallway, and you see the students who ride the bus in the mornings falling asleep at a lunch table in the cafeteria.

Hoover is somewhere your parents went to school and had the same teachers you have, or went to school with your teachers. There is a sense of community so strong in that school that you can feel it everywhere you walk. Teachers are always checking on you, not to keep you from getting into trouble, but to let you know there is someone in your corner. The teachers at Herbert Hoover High School are amazing men and women, and I can’t thank them enough for putting up with me and helping make me into the person and student I am today.

I could write a book about all the amazing things that happened within the walls of Herbert Hoover High School, but the reality is that even when the school isn’t there, the students and staff will still thrive. The Huskies are a group of state champions, record breakers, singers, dancers, hunters, fishers, jocks, geniuses, and comedians. We are a lot of very different people separately, but together we are a pack, together we can accomplish anything.

A big saying our teachers like to push is “Once a husky, always a husky.” I have giggled at that for the past four years, but now I know it isn’t just a saying, it is a lifestyle. So many people have stepped up in the past few weeks and offered help and services all in the name of the Huskies. I wouldn’t want to have graduated from any other school, and I know there is still so much to be done to recover from this flood, but I believe in the students and staff of Herbert Hoover High School. I believe in the Huskies because we are a force to be reckoned with.