Speak4Cambridge – Reflections on the 2019 Tornado
By Finley Caughran, Class of 2021
On October 20th, a tornado shook Cambridge to its core. In the middle of
my critical junior year, the school was left on its own to find a new home for over 100 students, yet Cambridge is defined by more than some high tech classrooms, fancy athletic buildings rather it’s the people, mission, and
dedication to learning that makes this school special.
Living in Dallas all my life I’ve heard many times “there’s a tornado warning” and nothing ever happened, so I was desensitized to the magnitude of harm they can cause in a city. When the tornado hit I thought to myself it will pass and nothing will go wrong. Little did I know that my school was being destroyed while I laid peacefully in my bed. I woke up the next morning to an overwhelming amount of texts about what had occurred during the night and that school was canceled. This was the beginning to a long road of not knowing what will happen next. For about 2 weeks we were out of school and didn’t know what the rest of our school year would look like. As you can imagine this put a ton of stress on the faculty as well as the students, during this time Cambridge came together as a community and everyone did what they could to help. After 2 weeks of waiting to see what’s next our headmaster, Paul Wolfe sent an email saying that we would be moving campuses to fellowship bible church and that we would resume school there. The move into the new campus was a little rocky considering we would not have all of the accommodations we did at the old campus, but Cambridge being the school it is helped us with whatever we needed to ease into this big change. One way in which I was impacted by the change was the fact that we lost our gym to the tornado.
Our basketball season starts in October, and this was a horrible way for our season to start. Our athletic directors Ashley and Kyle Kelly worked tirelessly to figure out places for us to play and practice. We practiced at many gyms and felt like a traveling basketball team always at a different place, but this in turn grew us closer as a team. Carpooling to practices is one of my most favorite memories of the season. Yet it’s these very moments when we rose from the wreckage and decided that the loss of our campus was not the loss of our drive for excellence in every aspect of what we do. As a small-private school, many feared students/teachers would just leave.
Instead, these are life’s moments of truth when love and virtue rise from wreckage. This included our range of excelling professors who despite losing their classrooms and supplies still remained dedicated to forming the hearts and minds of their students. For example, Art is one of my favorite classes and one of the classes at the school that requires the most supplies. During the change my art teacher, Professor Robson was very accommodating and supplied all the materials we needed to produce art. In times of disaster and distress it is important to have a community come and surround you during that time of need and that is exactly what the Cambridge community did during and after the tornado. I am beyond thankful and blessed to be a part of this amazing community.