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Hurricane Harvey forced these two high schools to consider modern-day segregation

Kingwood and Summer Creek High Schools are football rivals in Houston, Texas but Hurricane Harvey has forced them to share the same turf: a school building.

The predominantly white neighborhood of Kingwood lost their high school due to damage from the storm, forcing the school district to find a new building for their 2,800 kids. They ended up at Summer Creek High School, a school with predominantly black students, 13 miles away.

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The combined 5,000 students from both schools may share the same building, but they’re still not integrated. Students from Summer Creek attend class from 7-11 a.m, while Kingwood students take the later shift, from 12-4 p.m.

“We have a very racially tense political environment right now,” said Ashley Hill, AP English and social action teacher at Summer Creek, “So I think that this is a great opportunity to model how we engage one another.”

VICE News visited the two schools during the week of their first football game against each other, to see how the transition was going.

This segment originally aired Nov. 22, 2017, on VICE News Tonight on HBO.