I could feel the anger in Erin Kyle’s voice when I spoke to her last week. She was in the harried process of moving from a hotel to an apartment in the Marina del Rey section of Los Angeles because her family’s townhouse was destroyed in the Palisades fire. Her daughter, who will be 16 on Friday, was a sophomore at Palisades Charter High School, a beloved local institution of 2,900 students where “about 40 percent of the campus was damaged or destroyed,” the principal told The Los Angeles Times. Pali High is providing virtual instruction while school leaders try to find a temporary location for their students, who come from all over the city.
Kyle was especially furious and bereft because her daughter — like other Los Angeles high schoolers affected by the fire — has already had so much disruption to her young life. During Covid, Los Angeles schools stayed closed to in-person instruction longer than those of many other cities across the country. She talked about how much online learning harmed her daughter, a social butterfly, in fifth and sixth grade. “These kids suffered so much during that time period,” she said. I have heard this complaint from many parents over the past few years: California opened up hair salons and restaurants but kept schools closed, and that said everything about how the state values children and families.
“Just to have to do this again, it’s terrible,” Kyle said. “I mean, she’s traumatized from what we went through. We were stuck on the road for 45 minutes with fire on both sides of us trying to get out.” Even though her daughter was so happy at Pali — she was a cheerleader and had lots of friends — Kyle decided to enroll her at a public school in Manhattan Beach, where she will start next week. “She needs to be in school in person,” she told me.
School disruption from natural disasters is becoming more common because of climate change, and America is not ready for it. In 2023, Jonathan T. Overpeck, dean of the School for Environment and Sustainability at the University of Michigan, told The Times, “Pretty much anywhere in the United States you’re going to have to be more careful about this and perhaps change how we run our schools in order to accommodate climate change.”
More than a year later, I don’t think we’ve changed much. I spent the past week talking to parents, teachers and teenagers who experienced major climate-related school disruptions — not just from the fires in California but also from Hurricane Helene, which caused billions of dollars of damage in the Southeast in September and kept some schools closed for weeks.
These extreme weather events are fast-moving, and it would have been very difficult to anticipate the extent of their damage. “Having lived in California during drought and then wildfire, having lived in New York and seeing what happens with the hurricanes and things like that along the coast, I was like, maybe the mountains will be better,” said Jim Ray, who grew up in Asheville, N.C., and said he and his family moved back there in part because they thought it would be safer from climate-related disruption. They were not expecting a hundred-year flood triggered by a hurricane.
Speaking to recently dislocated parents, it was clear that the disruptions brought on by Covid still loomed large in their minds — a symbol that they, their children and their schools remain an afterthought.
In North Carolina, Buncombe County, where Asheville is situated, voted earlier this month to cut nearly $5 million — or 4 percent — from the school budget, despite protests. The local ABC station reported that the chair of the county board of commissioners said she would replenish the school budget once state and federal disaster funding came in. But considering the fact that President Trump proposed potentially eliminating the Federal Emergency Management Agency when he visited North Carolina last week, arguing that if disaster funding were left to the states, fixing problems would be “a lot less expensive,” it’s not looking good for those coffers to be refilled as much as they need to be.
Stephanie Forshee, who lives in Asheville and has two children who are 9 and 6 and who were out of school for a month because of Helene, told me she feels like “the town is in limbo and the news cycle has obviously moved on.” She’s concerned about how the next few years are going to play out because of the school budget cuts and because her county is not a wealthy area to begin with. “Currently, kids don’t seem to be the priority,” she said.
Beyond public K-12 budget cuts, preschool and child care programs are possibly more vulnerable in the aftermath of disasters because they’re so sensitive to enrollment changes. According to The Los Angeles Times, more than 300 child care facilities are still closed, and the damage is so extensive, there’s no telling when they might reopen. Furthermore, the child care industry already took a hit during the pandemic, when “California lost about 12 percent of its licensed child care capacity. The industry already struggles with such low profit margins — despite high prices for families — that any additional costs can destabilize providers and lead to closures.”
I spoke to Estela Maldonado, who has worked in a variety of roles at Methodist Preschool of Pacific Palisades for 11 years, and whose son also attends the preschool. She told me that the school building burned in the fires and lost half of its student body because so many families were displaced from their homes. The preschool is currently operating out of a temporary location in Santa Monica. Without funding from the students to keep the school afloat, staff members have had their hours cut, and now Maldonado is worried about supporting her family while the school looks for a permanent home.
Maldonado would like to see the government supporting early childhood educators financially in this moment of crisis with direct funding to make sure they can make it until they find a more permanent home and recoup their student body, but she is not optimistic. “To be honest, I don’t think any of us are really expecting it,” Maldonado said. But that does not mean she has lost hope. “You won’t find us giving up because it’s a job that we don’t see as a job. We see as the passion of our lives to serve the children and to serve their families,” she added.
Despite the heartbreak and despair that came through in these conversations, I was touched by the fierce love that people — especially the kids — had for their school communities. Moksha Bruno and her son Lincoln, a freshman at Pali High, both told me that even though they’re unhappy with virtual learning, Lincoln has no desire to leave Pali. Bruno said she and Lincoln’s father gave him the option to find another school, but “there was no question in his mind he wants to help rebuild it.”
She means that literally. Lincoln described the makerspace classes (a modern version of shop class, with woodworking, metalwork and arts and crafts) at Pali. He reached out to his makerspace teacher after the fire and asked if he and his fellow students could help with the rebuilding efforts. Lincoln is also a member of the school’s marching band, and he talked about how they’re working to source instruments and get together this week to practice at a park. “I’m a very social guy, and I need to see my friends and talk and hang out to be happy,” he told me.
What heartens Bruno is the number of people who want to help. “People want to help and are willing to give and do whatever it takes,” she said. I agree it is a blessing. I just wish that these individual efforts were better supported by our government.
Most critically, we can no longer greet national disasters of this scale as surprises. We can’t GoFundMe our way out of future climate disasters for our children. We need careful planning, and we need to recognize that kids only get one shot at an education — and that there is real mourning when they miss their first homecoming dance or their fifth grade graduation, when they don’t get to experience the normal and imperfect passage of each season.
When people lose everything, the communities that parents, teachers and children form around schools are even more vital. Rebuilding these bonds needs to be a national effort, and it should start now.
