 RINGGOLD, Ga. -- This morning, Anna Cashon will drive past the empty dirt lots scraped clean, the brand new gleaming houses and the silhouettes of framed buildings along Sparks Street into the newly paved Ringgold High School parking lot. She'll see the bent frame of a goal post and an empty lot where the football field was. She'll pass piles of wood stacked where the eighth-grade wing to the middle school used to be. She'll park her black 4Runner in the same spot she always has -- behind the school next to the band room. Giant letters on her back window spell out "Tex," painted in white with a heart to the right. 
That homage to her friend and fellow student killed in the tornado is a reminder that -- try as everyone might to make everything seem normal again -- some things will never be the same. As Anna and more than 1,000 other students walk into the school whose reconstruction was completed just days before the start of classes, they aren't just beginning a new academic year. Today will mark the first time students have been back together at the high school and at Ringgold Middle School since an F4 tornado plowed through both schools on April 27. It will be the first time for many to see the reconstructed buildings, to get away from the downtown destruction and boarded-up homes that still dot the community and just be teenagers and students again. The schools, like the students and the community, have been through a plague. "Before everything happened it was [just] a high school," Anna said. "After the tornado you thought differently about everybody. There's a lot that is special about that school." And while getting back into Ringgold Middle and High School in just four months can only be described by officials as a miracle, there will be challenges for students and teachers to overcome. Read more... Correction to this article. The GADA donated $3,000, not the Georgia Athletics Association. | 
