Easing the Return to School After a Natural Disaster

The winds whipped up and took a piece of the roof. We could see the Eaton fire in a bright orange line on the hill behind the house. Even so, my family knew we weren’t at the heart of the disaster or the tragedy that was unfolding across our city. 

By the time the fires had moved onto the other side of the mountain, Altadena had lost an estimated 40 percent of its homes as well as businesses, places of worship, and schools in a largely working-class area of Los Angeles. The Los Angeles Times reported that almost 10,000 structures burned in the Eaton fire, but as day broke, we would all soon learn that the tragedy of the fires in Los Angeles impacted not just the areas destroyed by flame, but periphery areas, schools, and districts as well.

My district, for instance, had approximately 15 percent of its teachers displaced, many having set up homes in Altadena. Another group of local families were suddenly housing multiple generations that had fled to safety. The districts that surrounded the eye of the fire, those who weren’t directly impacted by the loss of buildings within their districts, worked to open our doors again for our students, but we knew that we’d be opening up for a community in trauma.

A 2022 study from the U.S. Government Accountability Office on the effects of natural disasters on schools found that “academic recovery generally couldn’t take place until students and staff had begun their emotional recovery,” particularly students of our more marginalized or vulnerable communities. 

Betty Lai, a professor of counseling psychology at Boston College, explains that this trauma can persist for up to three months after an event, highlighting the importance of identifying students who require the most support.

Helping Support Teachers to Support Students

Once my little district committed to reopening on the upcoming Monday, it meant we had only four days to physically clean the sites, communicate with families, and assess any openings at the elementary level that could potentially serve for any students looking to temporarily enroll due to the loss of their local schools. It also gave us only four days to help support the teachers, many of whom were still looking for temporary housing themselves or helping other family members do so.

Those of us in the district office who weren’t in the process of recovering our homes met online to answer the greatest questions of the moment: What could we do to support teachers, those who were closest to students, when our doors reopened on Monday? How could we help them to just focus on loving the kids who showed up, and not be burdened by stressors anymore than they already were?

It was very important, for both the students and teachers, to not treat this as business as usual, even while maintaining the structure and smiles that the school setting provides. After all, the fires were still burning elsewhere in the city, and the air was still full of ash. We weren’t going to pretend the hard part was totally over, but our people needed help and support. What we in Educational Services provided wasn’t perfect—it couldn’t take the pain away from those who had lost so much, but it was what we could do. Our goal to create a trauma-informed and social and emotional return was for the students for sure, but as district leaders, we also needed to help provide some calmer entry for our staff as well. 

Three Steps for The First Days Back

Step one: The director of Student Services knew that the first thing we needed to do was know our community’s needs and fast. Instead of just sending out a ParentSquare survey to ask families questions about the windstorm and fire’s impact, we also sent one to all of the staff. Of those who responded, we learned who had lost a home, who had fled due to air quality, and who were now housing other family members. 

Step two: Educational Services reached out to our various professional learning communities that we belonged to seeking donations, not in the form of money or supplies, but of social and emotional learning (SEL)–focused lessons. We felt that if teachers were returning to the classroom to support kids in trauma, perhaps we could provide them with predesigned lessons so that they didn’t have to plan. The University of California, Irvine Writing Project came through with some writing lessons. Teachers from a charter school in Los Angeles came through with an elementary and high school–level cross-curricular Claim, Evidence, Reasoning lesson. PBLWorks sent out an all-call via their National Faculty Slack channel for social and emotional community builders.

In the end, the district curated SEL-focused lessons and created a slide deck of options for teachers, from transitional kindergarten to 12th grade. The deck used writing, drawing, and speaking as means for students to share their stories. Some of the slides were funny; some were thoughtful. Some slides focused on helping others. By choosing from various activities to do, not only did students learn about their peers’ experiences, but our teachers did too. Sharing stories and discussing shared experiences allowed those first few days to become a warm launch back into the swing of things.

These activities also served as a means to conduct an informal survey of the students and their needs. By encouraging discussion, a teacher could immediately tell which students needed counseling to help them through this time.

Step three: The district immediately took assessments off of the teachers’ plates. The fires happened during the midyear assessment window (which is a stress for many teachers), so the district put a moratorium on assessments and homework for a week. This not only allowed students to relax at school but meant that teachers didn’t have to grade. They could just focus on the empathy needed to start building up the community once again.

Lessons Learned

Empathy. Resilience. Communication. Those are just three of our district’s competencies from our Portrait of a Graduate. They saw us through Covid-19 and they saw us through another community event. 

The students in our Superintendent Student Advisory Committee, a fifth- through 12th-grade council that gives monthly input directly to the superintendent, shared that each one of them knew a person who lost their home. Thankfully, we had that committee set up ahead of time, another lesson learned during Covid-19. Those students provided feedback on the instructional materials we’d provided during those first few days and helped guide what we could provide in the future if need be.

We also learned that there were many teachers and students out there who wanted to help. Service was a part of their own healing, and there were many who weren’t sure how to provide support to others or how to identify who needed the help. We’re now considering ways to coordinate support that uses more of our community members who would like to volunteer. 

It was amazing to see how many teachers came to work on that Monday. The community was in trauma, but they were all still dedicated to supporting its students. For us in the district office, it was all about supporting our teachers.