In Disaster’s Aftermath: Stemming the Erosion of Instructional Time
School Administrator, August 2022

Ed Manansala (second from right), El Dorado County superintendent of schools in California, met with families after the August 2021 Caldor Fire forced thousands to evacuate their homes and closed six districts. PHOTO COURTESY OF EL DORADO COUNTY, CALIF., OFFICE OF EDUCATION

In spring 2019, Ed Manansala, El Dorado County superintendent of schools in California, assembled leaders of the county’s 15 school districts for a retreat to establish what he called a “relentless focus on instruction and learning.”

Less than a year later, COVID-19 arrived, forcing the county’s 30,000 students to learn virtually from home. Then, in mid-August 2021, just as the schools were preparing to bring students back into classrooms, the Caldor Fire erupted.

The blaze quickly forced the evacuation of thousands of residents in the rural county, which spreads over 180,000 square miles between Sacramento and Lake Tahoe in some of Northern California’s 1849 Gold Rush country. The fire closed six school districts and burned 1,003 structures and 222,000 acres over two months.

“Our world turned upside down,” Manansala says.

Educators who still had homes scrambled to teach. Some teachers set up class in a public library. Others provided virtual lessons. Still, the fire disrupted instruction for weeks.

After the fire burned the small Walt Tyler Elementary School and 400 homes in El Dorado County’s Grizzly Flats, the 300-student Pioneer Union School District closed for three weeks. Once open, says superintendent/principal Annette Lane, the district placed 30 of the 34 Walt Tyler students in its Somerset Elementary School and offered virtual instruction and independent study for students in temporary housing elsewhere.

Forced Absences

Scientists say climate change is helping fuel a rise in the number and strength of natural disasters across the country. And that’s costing instructional time even as the COVID-19 pandemic has spurred widespread absences and learning loss. For example, the 33,000 students in Louisiana’s Calcasieu Parish school system last school year lost 70 instructional days after two hurricanes, a deep freeze and floods repeatedly shut down the schools.

Wildfires have grown in size and intensity and become a big source of lost instructional time, especially in the West and Southwest. Acreage burned by wildfires each year has in-creased since the 1980s, with the 10 years of the largest burns occurring since 2004.

California sees about 7,000 to 8,000 fires a year. Superintendents now need to be prepared not only for snow days, but for a pandemic, wildfire, air quality degraded by smoke, even planned power shutoffs by utility companies as part of wildfire prevention, Manansala says.

That all adds up to lost instructional days.

Sharp Losses

CalMatters, a nonprofit news site, used California Department of Education data to report that between 2002 and 2019, public schools lost 21,442 days to wildfires, with a disaster day equaling a lost day of instruction at a single public school. Those losses occurred in 6,542 schools, affecting more than 3 million students, and about half were in the last two years.

Educators nationally need to find ways to sustain quality instruction even when hit by fires, hurricanes, tornadoes and floods, Manansala says.

“We have to manage through,” he says. “From the Caldor Fire to snow days, how do we develop systems that provide consistency of instruction and learning, even in the midst of those?” 

—  BILL GRAVES