Milton and Helene leave students, schools reeling

As Hurricane Milton slams into Florida — and amid Helene’s lingering destruction — students across the Southeast are facing severe disruptions to their academic year, posing challenges for both educators and children after they already witnessed devastation in their communities.  

Experts say the best thing for students after a tragic event is to get back to an established routine early, including back into schools as soon as possible. But between damage to school facilities and the mental health effects of the storm, that is not an easy task.

“We kind of see conflicting results in terms of the extent that students are able to bounce back — some are able to bounce back faster than others. Then, some of them may develop kind of symptoms of post-traumatic stress disorder,” said Cassandra Davis, an assistant professor in the Department of Public Policy at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill who focuses on environmental disruptions to schooling communities.  

Dozens of schools are closed after Hurricane Helene, according to The New York Times, keeping tens of thousands of students out of the classrooms. That storm killed more than 230 people, while the size of the impact from Milton remains to be seen.  

Teachers find themselves in a devastating situation as they have to cope with a new reality while trying to make sure no one falls behind.

“We’re seeing in North Carolina, where if the flooding didn’t destroy the school building itself, it might have destroyed the roads that would actually allow someone to return to the school building. So there’s a lot of variance in terms of if the building structure is still standing and something that can be gone back to,” said Erin P. Hambrick, coordinator of the School Mental Health Initiative at the Kansas State Department of Education Technical Assistance System Network.

If students can physically go back, it is important to engage in the “typical activities of daily living as soon as is safe or feasible, because that routine kind of brings back a predictability and predictability is really healthy for people,” Hambrick said.

“Reconnecting with our community is super key to recovery. At the same time, when you put people together who are all really struggling, it can make it hard for the learning tasks to really be completed. And so, what I always recommend is that we need to return kids to the structure and predictability of the school environment as soon as we can, but we need to kind of change our focus throughout the school day,” she added.  

And the one-two punch of Helene and Milton just weeks apart is unfortunately not a once-in-a-lifetime event for today’s youth. Climate change and the heating oceans are fueling more and stronger storms.

“I think there’s also just that underlying factor of kids’ awareness of climate change, and if kids are going through these repeated weather-related disasters, a lot of kids already have record-high levels of anxiety, sadness, fear about this kind of existential concern about climate change, and now, it’s directly impacting their lives over and over again,” said Karla Vermeulen, associate professor and deputy director of the Institute for Disaster Mental Health at the State University of New York at New Paltz.  

According to the National Weather Service, more than 11 million people were under evacuation orders ahead of Hurricane Milton, which made landfall Wednesday evening.

More than 50 of the 67 counties in Florida were under evacuation orders, and traffic has built up, according to the Sarasota Herald-Tribune, with trips in some areas lasting hours longer than normal.

Educators and parents are advised to try their best to give children a sense of normalcy and to create an environment where they can express themselves freely, with some kids likely to want to talk about how they are feeling and others not wanting to be reminded of the disaster all the time.

“Younger children might respond differently than older children, or high schoolers or middle schoolers, it’s a very developmental range. … They may have internalizing symptoms like anxiety, depression, symptoms of acute stress like disturbing dreams or memories or feeling like kind of hyperarousal, agitated, negative thoughts,” said Dana Rose Garfin, assistant professor-in-residence in the Department of Community Health Sciences at the Fielding School of Public Health at University of California, Los Angeles. 

But they could have more outward symptoms, such as “they could be crying more. They could act out during  playtime. … There’s a lot of different ways that children can kind of communicate their symptoms to the adults in their life,” said Garfin, who has studied the impact of hurricanes on communities for a decade.

“Some students might not be distressed. I mean, some students, some people, are very resilient after disasters, and they want to get back to school, and they want to kind of regain that sense of normalcy,” she added.