St. Rose preschoolers watch as construction crews pour foundation for new school

Two dozen preschoolers wearing yellow hard hats beamed as construction crews Thursday morning poured the foundation for their new preschool on the east end of the St. Rose Catholic School campus, the same spot their building stood before October’s Tubbs fire reduced it to rubble.

The 3- and 4-year-olds pressed against the chain-link fence to get a close look of the construction work, as well as the massive truck boom.

“The little ones love trucks,” said Principal Kathy Ryan, who held the gathering to mark a new chapter in the private parochial school’s recovery.

“We thought it would be nice for the kids to see it being rebuilt,” she said. “It’s part of their healing process.”

The campus on Old Redwood Highway north of Santa Rosa underwent an extensive renovation after October’s firestorm. While flames were contained to the preschool, two kindergarten classrooms and the playground after a determined stand Oct. 9 by local firefighters, the main building suffered heavy damage when the fire protection sprinklers were repressurized and flooded the K-8 school, Ryan said.

Students, who after the fire damage temporarily moved to the original ?St. Rose School and St. Luke Lutheran Church in downtown, returned to the campus in January after workers completed most of the renovations. However, the 50 or so preschoolers had to be housed in portables.

Their new preschool, which will cost about $1.5 million to build, should be completed no later than Thanksgiving, Ryan said. And it’ll look similar to the previous school.

“It was only 8 years old and it was perfect in every way,” Ryan said of the previous building. “We’re building back almost the exact same preschool.”

She planned to hang in the new building six decorative tiles that once were part of the school’s check-in counter and were discovered in the rubble. The tiles had been decorated by preschool students and alumni, including her daughter who was in high school at the time. She’d painted a pink elephant in the tile, in honor of the late Ursuline sister Cecelia Seymour, who liked to tell a story about a three-legged elephant, Ryan said.

She likes to think that the reason the fires spared much of the campus is because the school had “the Ursuline sisters in heaven rooting for us.”

You can reach Staff Writer Eloísa Ruano González at 707-521-5458 or eloisa.gonzalez@pressdemocrat.com. On Twitter @eloisanews.