Over winter break, some people went out of state to visit family, others stayed home, but for some of the staff at Topeka High school , winter break was a frozen, watery disaster.

“I could visibly see steam coming off of my heater in my room,” said Kenya Patzer, a Physics teacher at Topeka High, after walking into her room after winter break.

Across the hall, Steven Skoczek, came back from break to see his room all rearranged. after asking what had happened, he found out that a pipe inside the heater in his room had leftover water in it that had froze and eventually burst the pipe.

“I cannot stress enough how well the custodians did a great job of cleaning the place up and getting me ready to teach classes for the second semester,” Skoczek said. Skoczek did not have to teach in another room for any amount of time, and that there was no standing water in his room.

But even with the custodians doing so well in Skoczek’s room, there was still water all over the second floor, flowing down the main stairwell and into the rooms adjacent to Skoczek’s.

After a fiasco of a week before school started, the water is all cleaned up, and as of January 30th, they fixed the ceiling tiles in the cafeteria.