State testing records and other student data were scattered on the cafeteria floor last month at the shuttered Gary Lew Wallace High School.
The documents underscore the challenge facing Gary's emergency manager, who's charged with putting the cash-starved district back together. Dozens of closed schools still contain books, records and equipment.
At Lew Wallace, transcripts were stored in a flooded basement. A central office secretary must don protective equipment to retrieve one.
City officials, including Mayor Karen Freeman-Wilson, and councilwomen Carolyn Rogers, D-4th, and LaVetta Sparks-Wade, D-5th, have urged the school district to spruce up, sell or demolish the more than 30 closed schools that have become eyesores across the city. Rogers said recently the tattered schools represent "devastation" to a neighborhood.
But the district is barred from selling its schools because the Internal Revenue Service has liens on all of them since the district failed to pay payroll taxes from 2013-15. It owes the IRS $8.4 million.
The district's financial and academic woes led the General Assembly to the brink of dissolving the district earlier this year. In the end, lawmakers approved a measure installing an emergency management firm to run the district. Elected school board members now have no authority.
Gary Schools Recovery LLC is the firm selected by the state with retired Indiana superintendent Peggy Hinckley serving as emergency manager. Her staff is addressing the vacant school issue, but has no money for improvements.
Still, a plan is coming together to clean out the schools. Gary Schools Recovery chief of staff Paul Pastorek said the district will begin storing student records, trophies, textbooks and other items at the school service center, 1988 Polk St.
Hinckley and Pastorek said they were surprised to find all the items left behind in the schools. Hinckley said she was told the schools were secured when they closed.
In a storage room at Lew Wallace, new English textbooks, still in plastic wrap, line the shelves. Hinckley said she had just used $1.5 million in federal money to purchase new textbooks before the discovery was made.
Scrappers have taken copper, wiring and other materials. In August, an arson fire erupted on the south side of Lew Wallace inside a classroom, and officials say vandals and even squatters frequent the school. The ground floor windows have been boarded up.
At the closed Horace Mann High School, built in Gary's golden age as steel jobs drew thousands into the city, there have been at least two fires. In May, the auditorium was destroyed. Another fire broke out in August.
A fire also damaged the closed Edison school in August. Both Edison and Horace Mann have been closed for more than a decade.