Their school bell is a referee's whistle. Their football locker room is a three-stall garage. The home economics kitchen doubles as a science lab, and the principal's office is tucked away in a corner of a mobile home attached to the side of a 4-H building.

In the year of the flood, this is Ada-Borup High.

Eight months after flood waters soaked and devastated much of the Red River Valley, school districts from Breckenridge, Minn., to the Canadian border are struggling to rebuild and renovate buildings damaged by sewage and standing water.

In Ada, where the Wild Rice and Marsh rivers backed up, spread across town and destroyed a high school, nearly 300 students in ...