When Elizabeth Steere’s two sons were little, the family watched The Wizard of Oz and its famous tornado scene that whips Dorothy through the air.
Steere, who lives in Asheville, North Carolina, assured her kids, now 11 and 13, not to worry. “I remember saying, very glibly, ‘That’s not something you guys have to worry about,’” Steele recalled.
Then on 26 September, Helene struck the region as a tropical storm, killing scores of people, destroying whole towns, tearing apart roads, downing power lines, and contaminating water supplies. The waters damaged several schools in the region and left many without potable water.
Nearly a month later, about 76,000 students in western North Carolina are still out of school and families are scrambling to cope with the loss of routine and structure.
“I never imagined that we’d have this level of disruption due to weather,” said Ashley Mosley, who went with her two children to her mother’s home in Mississippi while waiting for local schools to reopen. “Asheville is a place that people move to get away from that – from hurricane-prone areas or wildfire-prone areas. I think none of us ever saw this coming.”
Many of the closures in North Carolina are due to lack of safe drinking water and road repairs, and officials in Asheville said public schools were set to reopen on 28 October.
Globally, climate-related disasters disrupt the education of some 40 million children each year, according to Unicef, whose researchers say that figure is on the rise as the intensity and frequency of heat and storms increase.
Schools in California, Nevada and Oregon have closed in recent weeks due to wildfires, and across the country districts have closed due to extreme heat. Just weeks after Helene, Hurricane Milton forced schools across Florida to briefly close.
The impacts aren’t felt evenly: students from vulnerable populations face “heightened challenges” according to a 2022 federal report on disaster recovery. “[T]he disasters caused significant emotional trauma to students due to stressors including extended housing instability, food insecurity, parental job loss and social disconnection,” the authors wrote.
About 44% of children in Asheville public schools are economically disadvantaged, according to a population research center at UNC Chapel Hill, meaning they have a household income less than 185% of the federal poverty line.
It’s not just closures that affect kids’ ability to learn. Researchers have linked extreme heat during the school year with learning loss, and lower-income students, who are less likely to have air-conditioned classrooms and homes, are often the most vulnerable. Wildfires have also been found to “generate significant negative impacts on academic performance among younger children”, according to 2022 analysis in Scientific Reports. Air pollution associated with fires is also associated with higher rates of asthma in children.
“We haven’t had an intentional conversation [about how] climate change is real, and let’s talk about the different ways it’s impacted our schools from the temperature recess to the temperature for football practice and field hockey practice,” said an Asheville schools spokesperson, Kimberly Dechant. She added that district officials were currently writing grant proposals for after-school tutoring to help kids catch up following the closures.
Researchers say the learning disruptions, paired with the trauma of the disaster itself, can set children back for years.
“It’s completely devastating, especially since students rely on going to school for that sense of normalcy,” says Dr Cassandra R Davis, assistant professor in the department of public policy of the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. She studies community resilience following disasters and has found that, among schoolchildren, one age group tends to fare the worst: “We found that, especially for elementary students, that they regress.”
Research on pandemic-related learning loss provides some clues about who suffers most from school disruptions. According to a 2021 McKinsey analysis of the the impact of the pandemic on K–12 learning, students at predominantly low-income schools and in urban locations fared worse than those in higher-income and suburban locations.
In addition to the academic disruption, there is the emotional fallout from the disaster. Davis recalled that after Hurricane Matthew struck in October 2016, educators “spoke about how their students in April were still becoming very emotional when it rained outside, thinking that that would be the next hurricane” – six months later.
Steere says one of the most difficult disruptions for her kids has been missing “human contact and their social lives”. Her older son was desperate for cell service to reach his peers, she said, adding that his charter school reopened last week.
Steere’s 11-year-old son, who has autism, has struggled with the lack of structure school typically provides. “For autistic kids, routine is everything,” she said. “Routine is king, and school offers routine.”
Her younger son has been attending a bridge learning program set up by the school district for two hours a day while he waits for his school to reopen. Steere is grateful he’s able to socialize, but said it “has been a different building, a bunch of different people, a very crowded classroom and probably very noisy”. His favorite playground, located near an RV park, was also damaged when several RVs smashed into it during the flood.
Mosley, a clinical psychologist, said that she enrolled her two kids in school in Mississippi – one in kindergarten, one in third-grade – for a couple weeks in part so she could continue to work. The assumption among families was that “when water came back, school would come back,” she said. “We were being given these estimates of weeks to months for water [to return]. And I couldn’t go weeks to months without a paycheck.”
Asheville school administrators are shipping in outside drinking water ahead of next week’s reopening. Though officials expect most students will return, Dechant said that so far, they have received 15 student records requests from other school systems. Some families said they plan to return at the end of the semester, she said. But others may relocate entirely.
“[The superintendent] has said all along you have to do what’s best for your family,” Dechant said.
Steere said it had been a relief to have her older son return to his charter school, and that teachers were helping students process Helene and its aftermath. “They had them write about their hurricane experiences, and he wrote a poem yesterday about the [River Arts District],” she said. “I think that really helped him – like, he was really proud and wanted to show it to us.”
She continued: “And that’s something schools can offer, right? I’m not going to do that.”
