Kim Dechant has never seen anything devastate Asheville, N.C., as much as Hurricane Helene has.
The chief of staff for Asheville city schools was driving back from Raleigh on Monday, with cases of water for her neighbors and colleagues. She had to leave the region before she was able to send out communications to families, many of whom still lack electricity.
Across western North Carolina, schools face weeklong to indefinite closures as school leaders take stock of their buildings, contact educators and staff, and try to communicate with families—all tasks made more difficult with power outages and disrupted cell reception. In the more mountainous regions of the state, where the scale of the devastation is unfolding slowly, school districts have had an even harder time getting in touch with their students and their families.
“I can’t even begin to describe the kind of devastation in the hilly parts of our county,” said Richard Garland, who’s in charge of marketing and community relations at Rutherford County schools in southwestern N.C., which borders the Blue Ridge Mountains. The southern part of the county has been without power, cell service, and other essentials since the hurricane made landfall late last week.
More than 100 people in six states were killed as Hurricane Helene swept through the Gulf Coast up through the Appalachian Mountains last week, and the toll may still rise as emergency workers continue their rescue efforts. More than 700,000 people still have no power in the Carolinas, days after the storm, according to Duke Energy, an electric utility.
In Asheville, about 125 miles northwest of Charlotte, roads were washed out from mudslides, trees were downed, and power lines were mangled, Dechant said. The Asheville city district has closed schools indefinitely.
“Until cell service is restored and power is restored and we have water, it’s going to be very difficult to bring our students back into the buildings,” she said.
A long road to recovery
Recovery from natural disasters like hurricanes takes a long time for districts. It also happens unevenly for underserved communities, said Cassandra Davis, a professor of public policy at University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. Davis studied how two hurricanes, Matthew in 2016 and Florence in 2018, affected student learning in the southeastern United States.
Her research found that elementary students fell behind academically for as long as two years following the storm. More affluent districts, with robust school budgets, recovered more quickly. Communities of color, or low socioeconomic communities, have a more difficult time recovering after such devastation. Those patterns are potentially compounded by the significant damage communities in western North Carolina endured.
“We all as a community, we have a short-term memory of these very horrific events, but they’re not short term by those who are experiencing them,” Davis said.
She’s found that stipends and gift cards can be helpful for educators getting their classrooms and homes back together after a natural disaster. Long-term support like school psychologists and mental health professionals, available for both students and staff, will be vital in the years to come, she said.
Studies on the emotional toll of disasters on students show an uptick in behavioral challenges.
“They’re not able to collect information, retain information, go over information around their schooling at this period,” Davis said. “The differences of when students are ready and able to do that—that varies, given that this event just happened.”
The disruption to schooling is compounding those of the COVID-19 pandemic, which Dechant worries about. It almost feels like the same ground, retread.
“These kids went to school during COVID. This is another huge, significant time period that is going to be that gap in learning,” she said. “They’re not going to have an opportunity to be in the classroom. I’m extremely concerned about their social-emotional wellbeing. For some of our kids, we know school is the place the majority of their meals come from.”
Schools step in to help as they navigate extended closures
In the Asheville city district, families will get a 72-hour notice before classes resume, and Dechant isn’t sure when that will be. School facilities weren’t damaged, she said.
The district isn’t pivoting to remote learning. With the speed with which the storm unfolded, the district wasn’t able to pass out paper packets and make sure older students had technology in hand.
Temporary cell towers have been set up—including one in Asheville Middle School—and slowly the community is coming back online, Dechant said. The centrally located school has served as a hub for the community, with cellphone charging stations. The Federal Emergency Management Agency was expected to set up there for assistance, she said.
Dechant said the Asheville city superintendent is coordinating with the broader Buncombe County government. Given power outages, the district donated its perishable foods to shelters to be distributed to the people there. The district, which keeps fuel on hand for transportation needs, gave its reserves to local nursing homes for their generators.
In neighboring South Carolina, Tracie Anderson Swilley, the principal of Fairfield Central High School in Winnsboro, has opened up her campus for families to take showers, charge their phones, and even squeeze in a game of basketball.
“I know the kids are going stir-crazy sitting in their homes without power,” Swilley said.
In her local community, the storm left trees uprooted and roads inaccessible. Some families will continue to be without power until Thursday. The initial storm could also be just the start of their issues—rising lake levels and flooding in the aftermath could continue to disrupt schooling.
Swilley had already prepared her team to pivot to online schooling, because South Carolina, she said, is often affected by severe weather. The school has virtual learning plans ready to go, which include training students to download their work, so that they can work offline if the power, and the internet, goes down.
“There’s less pressure on the staff if we have these plans in place. You cannot predict, but you can be prepared,” Swilley said.
But for school districts that were in the eye of the storm, delivering basic amenities has become just as—if not more—important.
Garland, in Rutherford County, said principals in his district are stationed next to their phones, ready to help their communities. These school leaders have also proactively called families to keep them updated about school closures and information where they can go to fulfill their basic needs.
For now, all the schools in the district are closed indefinitely. The 7,500-student district has said Monday and Tuesday will be remote learning days for students and optional remote work days for teachers.
“We recognize that remote learning and remote work are simply impossible for most students, employees, and families across our county given almost universal power outages and crippling disruptions to cellular and internet services,” a district notice read. "[N]o student or school employee will be penalized for not working remotely as we navigate unprecedented challenges together as a community.”
The district is also assessing the damage to school buildings, and so far, Garland said, the buildings haven’t suffered any severe damage. One school, in the hilly areas of Rutherford where helicopters are being used for evacuations, has been set up as a temporary shelter for families in the area. Two other schools are being used for shelter, one especially for evacuees from Lake Lure and Chimney Rock—two areas heavily impacted by the hurricane.
Rutherford provides free or reduced meals to all students in the district, so getting food services back on track has been a top priority. Garland said the district has teamed up with its nutrition services team to organize mobile kitchens to serve food to students and their families. The district is also setting up a supply chain, through local food banks and other community organizations, for water and power generators to families in need.
In these unprecedented times, Garland said, the district is trying to meet both the educational and survival needs of the families affected or displaced by the storm.
“We’re trying to cover all the bases,” he said. “Everything’s just so raw right now that not a lot of things are in place. There are a lot of moving parts.”
