JOPLIN, Mo. — Debbie Fort just wanted to take a look around, peek inside classrooms and again feel what it’s like to be where children are learning.

So one morning in late May, three days after a tornado wiped away one-third of Joplin, Mo., including the elementary school where she was principal, Fort stopped at a school in neighboring Webb City.

“Can I just walk your hallways?” Fort asked. She wasn’t looking for reminders of what the category EF-5 tornado stole on May 22, but of what she and others in Joplin would be pushing to restore.

She walked past decorated bulletin boards and posters. Eyed stacks of books. Watched teachers as they called on eager kids with hands stretched high.

“I needed that,” Fort says now. “I needed to see the kids and the books and the learning. I needed to know that one day we will be there again.”

A heavy task

That one day is almost here.

Despite the debris that still litters Joplin and the hovering uncertainty of just how many families will rebuild, Fort and other educators are counting the days to school.

At this point, students are expected to return to the classroom Aug. 17, right on schedule, even though six of the district’s 19 school buildings, including the high school, were destroyed. Three other schools were heavily damaged.

Most of the students will go to a different school than they did last year, many of them in refurbished or retrofitted facilities. A few classes will be in trailers.

And because so many families lost their homes, some students now live outside the Joplin district on rental property or in Federal Emergency Management Agency trailers and will be bused in from towns as far as a county over.

Yet even with the distractions, they’ll try to pick up where they left off on May 20, the Friday before high school graduation and two weeks before summer vacation. Two days later, the tornado tore through Joplin, killing 160 people and injuring more than 900.

Among the dead: one school secretary and seven students, including one young man who was sucked from his vehicle on his way home from his graduation ceremony.

Since that night, many doubted that the district would be able to have school for all its 7,700 children this fall, much less open on time. How could it, with so many schools damaged or gone?

Creative solutions

Superintendent C.J. Huff was finishing his third year in Joplin when the tornado hit.

“I wanted what everyone wanted,” he says today. “Getting the kids back in school is the best thing we can do for our kids, our families, and give our community the best chance for rebuilding.”

By the next morning, after he created his first post-storm organizational chart in the middle of the night, the countdown to school began.

Just 86 days.

“Somebody told me it couldn’t be done,” says Huff, who turned 41 the day before the tornado. “Which is all it takes to get me going.”

Some admit that in those early days they were skeptical classes could start on time. Sure, they knew what the district could accomplish when teachers and administrators pulled together. In the past few years, the district had raised test scores and improved the graduation rate. But to find and create learning space for 4,200 kids — 54 percent of the district — in 12 weeks?

“I thought, ‘I don’t know how we’re going to do this,’ ” said Kerry Sechetta, the high school principal. “I didn’t think it could be done.”

The first question: Where do we put the kids? Sechetta knew he couldn’t keep all the high schoolers together. No place in town could hold 2,200 students. They’d have to be split up.

Freshmen and sophomores could go to the Memorial Education Center, which in previous years had been a high school and middle school and junior college. But what about the upperclassmen?

One thought was the Northpark Mall and the old Shopko facility, a long-vacant box store across the parking lot from Macy’s and Sears.

“I was like, ‘Oh, great, he’s going to be out shopping or at the food court when he’s supposed to be in class,” said parent Laura Land, whose older child will be a junior this year. But she and other doubters had no clue what administrators were cooking up with architects and contractors. Land now is becoming a believer.

‘Life goes on’

The big-box store has become a 21st-century high school.

Inside, there are movable walls to better use space and wide corridors where students can plop down on the carpet, plug in their laptops — which every high school student will receive — and go to work. Instead of a gym, the school for 11th- and 12th-graders will have a fitness center. It’ll also have a coffee shop, open before school and run by a class of business students.

“When we first found out we were going to the mall for school, I just thought my senior year was going to be the biggest joke,” said Emma Cox, 17. Then she took a tour of the new facility. “It looks they put so much thought into it,” she said. “If I didn’t know I was at the mall, I would think I was in a regular school.”

Every day on her way home from summer school, Fort stops by Washington Elementary, Irving’s new home. She can’t stay away. Walking the halls makes her feel more at home, familiar with where she and her teachers are scheduled to welcome students in just 17 days.

In the first days after the storm, Fort had one request for Huff.

“I don’t care where you put us, just keep us together,” Fort remembers saying. “It was critically important that we stay together. We truly are a family.”

The district still doesn’t know how many students will return. So far, about three-fourths of the 7,700 students have been contacted and nearly 92 percent of those say they plan to come back.

“Life goes on and we’re going to come out stronger,” Fort said.

It’s what she tells her teachers. What they’ll tell the students.

And what she constantly tells herself.