Steering Through Disasters and Tragedy

Rob Anderson, superintendent of the Boulder Valley School District in Boulder, Colo., overlooks a neighborhood where the Marshall Fire last December seriously impacted 1,047 students and 100 staff members, with about half of students and some staff losing their homes. PHOTO COURTESY OF BOULDER VALLEY, COLO., SCHOOL DISTRICT

On the morning of Aug. 27, 2020, Karl Bruchhaus, superintendent of Calcasieu Parish school system, weaved 50 miles through hurricane debris to his district’s technology center in Lake Charles, La. Power and cellphones were dead. But the center had emergency generator service, access to e-mail, the internet and computer files and maybe some members of his administrative crisis team.

During 26 years in the district, his last eight as superintendent, Bruchhaus usually rode out Gulf Coast hurricanes. But this time he sheltered with relatives as his staff, 33,000 students and most parish residents also evacuated. Hurricane Laura had become a massive Category 4 storm with sustained winds of 150 miles per hour, one of the three largest ever to hit Louisiana.

Like Bruchhaus, Skylar Dever Fontenot, the Calcasieu Parish’s risk manager, drove her jeep the next morning to the tech center, past destroyed homes, a roofless LaGrange High School and the Fox News transmission tower that had tumbled onto the Golden Corral restaurant.

Lake Charles, she says, “looked like a war-wrecked city.”

By afternoon, Bruchhaus, Fontenot and three other administrators were in the tech center, communicating with scattered staff, students and families through e-mail. They also sent two remediation companies to assess damage and begin repairing schools.

The hurricane was the first of four extreme weather-related events to strike Calcasieu Parish in 2020-21. It was followed by a second hurricane, a February deep freeze and major flooding in May. The series of disasters cost 70 instructional days and displaced thousands of students, 4,000 of whom have left the school district.

Weathering Disasters

Even as they’ve wrestled with the pandemic over the last two years, school administrators have led districts across the nation through hurricanes, floods, tornadoes and fires that have grown in number, size and strength. The National Centers for Environmental Information reports 20 climate-related events severe enough to cost more than $1 billion each in losses battered the United States last year, well above the annual average of eight such events since 1980.

Bruchhaus and other school system leaders who weathered natural disasters generally had prepared for them and followed similar steps in the aftermath of each. They assembled administrative crisis teams and chains of command, who led efforts to establish communication; assessed the disasters’ impact on schools, staff and students; and coordinated donations and relief supplies. They also contacted the Federal Emergency Management Agency, found contractors for repairs and coordinated response efforts with city and county leaders, emergency crews and other agencies.

A priority for all administrators amidst the crises was to get schools open quickly because schools are equipped to offer food and support and a safe place for children while parents get back on their feet. “Without schools,” says Fontenot, “our city and community cannot recover.”

Most administrators say COVID-19 protocols dissolved in the frenzy of their disaster responses, but remote learning infrastructures built for COVID-19 helped them reach families and offer virtual instruction.

Wide Hurricane Damage

Calcasieu Parish did not have the option to resume classes quickly. The hurricane damaged buildings on all 76 campuses, peeling roofs off most. Remediation crews told Bruchhaus he couldn’t open schools for a year.

“I told them they had 45 days,” says Bruchhaus, who retired from the superintendency in June.

It took the parish a month to regain water and electricity, and the district then opened 20 schools. Bruchhaus says he wanted students back in person in classrooms with teachers, who he says proved that “quality instruction can happen,” even in leaky rooms with cement floors and missing lights.

Two weeks later, Hurricane Delta, a Category 2 storm, clobbered the parish, ripping off temporary roofs and soaking classrooms. A February freeze closed the district for another week. All schools were operating on May 17 when 15 inches of rain swamped the district. The flood trapped students in some schools late into the night until authorities were able to rescue them with a high-water vehicle.

The superintendent, who trained early in his career as a certified public accountant, says one of his major challenges has been rebuilding the district with borrowed money while waiting for FEMA aid. The school district sustained $400 million in damages, yet 21 months after Hurricane Laura, it had received only $100 million from FEMA, says Wilfred Bourne, Calcasieu’s chief financial officer.

Another challenge, according to Bruchhaus, is to reassure emotionally worn students, staff and parents that “we’re going to get back to where we need to be.” If the superintendent can’t project that, he says, “your people can’t believe it.”

Facing the Marshall Fire

Rob Anderson, superintendent of the 30,000-student Boulder Valley School District in Colorado, was spending his winter break in the Rocky Mountains when a wildfire swept through his district’s eastern section, burning businesses and 1,084 homes, including entire subdivisions.

Fanned by wind gusts over 100 miles per hour, what would be called the Marshall Fire erupted about 11 a.m. last Dec. 30 and, in just six hours, swept east through the suburban towns of Superior and Louisville.

Tammy Lawrence, Boulder Valley’s director of student support services, could see billowing smoke and hear howling wind from her home as she scheduled a virtual standup with her three trauma teams for mid-afternoon.

Several Boulder Valley school bus drivers volunteered to drive toward the raging fire to evacuate patients from a memory care home. “There were literally embers hitting our bus,” says driver Jane Fastenau. “The houses just to the right of us were on fire. I was in a propane bus.”

By 5 p.m., the fire stopped spreading as the wind died. Anderson, Boulder’s superintendent since 2018, says he went to bed unsure “if schools were going to burn down, if my home was going to burn down.”

Miraculously, no school structures, not even those in Superior and Louisville, were harmed. Anderson’s well-organized crisis team had rehearsed disaster drills and knew their roles. After inspecting schools and consulting industrial hygienists, Rob Price, assistant superintendent of operational services, brought in restoration companies to scrub affected schools of hazardous ash and debris.

The district’s first priority was to find who among students and staff had been displaced by the fire and to determine how to help them, Anderson says. He gave staff members affected by the fire two weeks of leave and raised substitute teacher pay.

The school district created a website forum where families could share information and help produce a list of people seriously affected by the fire, which impacted 1,047 students and about 100 employees. Anderson took in one family.

The administration pushed hard to open schools on Jan. 3 as planned because leaders knew schools could provide food and support services to students while displaced parents found housing.

Three days after the fire, Lawrence and her mental health team set up shop in the administrative offices in Boulder and invited people to drop in. They also sent e-mails to staff, students and parents with information on how to make virtual appointments with trauma workers, who counseled and connected people to housing, food and services. A local foundation supplied 100 affected students with new back-packs, Chromebooks and school supplies.

Eventually, with help from neighboring districts, Lawrence’s team established trauma teams in nine schools. During the first three weeks after the wildfire, they fielded more than 500 referrals from staff and students and made more than 1,000 virtual visits.

“We just have to work together,” says Lawrence, “and get through it together.”

A Devastating Downpour

Richard Rye, superintendent of the Humphreys County School District in Waverly, Tenn., was swept off his feet at a school facility when floodwaters overwhelmed the area on Aug. 20, 2021. PHOTOS COURTESY OF RICHARD RYE

It wasn’t even raining on Aug. 20 last year when Richard Rye, superintendent of the 3,000-student Humphreys County School District, 55 miles west of Nashville, Tenn., went home after Waverly Central High’s football game.

Eight hours later, he stood helpless on the roof of Waverly Junior High without cellphone service as he watched a muddy flash flood carry the Head Start building into a nearby football field. Nearby, principal Vivian Spencer, her daughter and two adults found refuge from rising water atop the gymnasium bleachers inside Waverly Elementary.

No one had predicted the 17-inch downpour, which in hours delivered 5-foot-high water into two Waverly schools, swamped 600 homes and killed 20, including three students. The community shuddered at how many hundreds of students might have perished if rain had come a day earlier when 1,100 children were inside the Waverly schools.

Waking Saturday morning to heavy rain, Rye knew sandbags had to be piled at the doors of the Waverly schools, an effective measure during floods in 2010 and 2019. His maintenance crew could not get past flooded driveways, so he and his bus mechanic backed a pickup full of sandbags up to the Waverly Junior High doors and went to work. Soon they stood in water.

“It went from my ankles to over my knees in three minutes,” Rye says. “I have never seen water come up that fast.”

Rye and the mechanic jumped in the truck, but it was swamped. They got out and were swept off their feet. They climbed up to the school and, with help of a ladder atop another truck, to safety on the roof.

After several hours, Rye made it to the district office two miles east to find water had been up to the seat of his office chair. Computers, servers, payroll and other central-office data were swamped. In a nearby parking lot, 17 district buses had been sitting under water.

Rye and his colleagues assembled a crisis team in a neighboring school library. They concluded Waverly elementary and middle schools were beyond repair. But Waverly Central High could be dried out, salvaged and used to accommodate some of the 1,100 displaced students.

The crisis team got creative, Rye says. They moved students into makeshift classrooms in gyms, auditorium stages, vocational shops and other spaces. Neighboring districts lent 13 buses and a recreational vehicle as an office for Rye. The district brought in mental health experts from neighboring school districts for traumatized staff and students.

Three weeks later, students were back in school. Because of a lack of housing, about 150 of them left the school district.

Rye spends hours a day providing documents and evidence for FEMA money. “I’m a fixer,” he says, so the slow process of recovery is frustrating. It helps, he adds, to take the long view. The district purchased an expansive, brick, former boot factory to retrofit for temporary classrooms. Within four or five years, it will build new schools on high ground. For now, Rye says, the district is healing.

“Everybody knows someone who was affected by this devastation,” he adds.

BILL GRAVES is a freelance education writer in Beaverton, Ore. Twitter: @Billgrav