What The Hell America!

Adrinda Kelly watched from New York as Hurricane Katrina swallowed her hometown of New Orleans in 2005. Floodwaters rose, neighborhoods disappeared underwater, and she felt a familiar ache deepen. 

Her family was safe, but devastation quickly compounded a painful realization: Black children were portrayed as disposable, and New Orleans’ education system was almost completely privatized. Black students’ test scores faltered.

Almost two decades later and nearly 2,000 miles away, similar echoes reverberated in Altadena, California, as wildfires swept through Los Angeles County in January. Flames consumed buildings and homes, but also something less tangible: the future of hundreds of thousands of students. More than 700,000 California children, mainly Black and Latino, missed school, some for weeks, and many still haven’t fully returned. Adding injury to insult, more than 100 local teachers were laid off in the month after the blaze.

Just as Katrina’s chaos reshaped New Orleans, wildfires in Altadena underscore how climate disasters deepen educational inequities, disproportionately harming students already grappling with systemic neglect. With every disaster, students lose not just classroom hours, but opportunities, confidence, and stability. In a nation increasingly battered by severe weather, the question Kelly first grappled with after Katrina now confronts communities nationwide: Will these disasters become catalysts for deeper injustice, or opportunities for lasting change?

“Natural disasters have an outsized impact on Black and vulnerable communities,” said Kelly, executive director of BE NOLA, an organization focused on improving the education system for Black children in New Orleans. “In places like New Orleans, disasters have been leveraged to break up concentrated Black political and educational power, deepening inequities.”

With climate change fueling more frequent and severe disasters, the number of school days lost is growing, and so are the consequences. This school year, students in Florida and Louisiana have lost more than a week of school due to hurricanes and snowstorms. In North Carolina, some students went more than a month without in-person instruction due to Hurricane Helene. 

Research found that academic performance drops with every school closure, and so does the likelihood of a student pursuing higher education. 

In communities still recovering from the disruption of pandemic-era education, this is yet another devastating blow.

“COVID was this monster of a disaster that showed us how unprepared we are, and we are seeing the same things with these climate-induced disasters,” said Cassandra Davis, a University of North Carolina professor who has spent years studying how American schools are and aren’t preparing for the onslaught of severe weather. 

Across the world, 400 million children lose school days each year due to climate-related disasters. In 2023, millions of students lost school time due to floods, fires, and extreme heat across 40 U.S. states. 

Without coordinated action — from mental health support to infrastructure planning — the cost to students, particularly those already marginalized, will keep rising. 

Even after schools reopen, educators fear the upheaval will leave lasting scars on students’ learning and mental health. Research shows that children who live through natural disasters are more likely to face acute illnesses, anxiety, and depression. Missed days add up, and the stress of trauma can disrupt brain function and development, making it even harder for students to keep up in the classroom. 

With Black Americans exposed to more extreme weather events than the average American, the crisis is uniquely impactful. 

Yet, support for recovery is uneven at best. While state and local officials have promised aid, families often experience it as slow and fragmented. Some school districts have rushed to provide temporary classrooms and counseling, but in historically underfunded Black and Latino areas, resources remain limited. FEMA may reimburse rebuilding costs, but it doesn’t cover lost learning time or the ongoing support students need to heal emotionally and academically.

Davis also pointed out that FEMA often requires schools to prove that damage was caused by the disaster and not by preexisting conditions. 

“If you were a school that had mildew, doors that didn’t work — things we, unfortunately, see in low-income communities — then a hurricane comes through, FEMA could argue, ‘Hey, we don’t know if the damage here was caused because of the storm, or was here all along,’” she said. “So schools already under-resourced get punished again.”

As a result, lower-income school districts often go into debt rebuilding, which can lead to mass closures of public schools or states appointing an emergency business and financial manager to take control of a school district’s finances. Typically, when that happens, making school districts financially secure overweighs the best interests of students, experts said. The aftermath of Hurricane Katrina provides a stark warning: Black students endured the longest school closures, the highest rates of displacement, and some never returned to school at all. Twenty years later, the school district has still not recovered. 

Using Hurricane Katrina as a blueprint 

After Katrina, Kelly’s mission became clear: to push back against education reforms that often marginalized Black educators under the guise of progress.

“So much of the educational transformations post-Katrina were on the backs of a false narrative of Black educators failing Black children,” she said. 

It was a narrative that dismissed an experienced workforce — primarily Black women — who had formed the backbone of the city’s educational and political power structures. Overnight, over 7,500 educators lost their jobs, leaving the city with a much younger, less experienced teaching force.

 “Not only was it economically painful,” Kelly explains, “but we pushed out assets: educators who understood the culture, communities, and families.”

Twenty years after Katrina, despite claims of reform success, she notes that only about 30% of Black children in New Orleans currently read at grade level — “after the Civil War, literacy rates for Black people here were around 67%,” she said.

She describes the post-Katrina era as having produced “quality outcomes for some children, but not for the majority.”

For other cities facing natural disasters, Kelly emphasizes vigilance: “Disaster policy can be leveraged to reshape entire education systems, often sidelining local communities in the process.” 

She urges communities to safeguard local educators and community voices, ensuring that rebuilding efforts reflect local needs and priorities rather than external agendas.

To protect Black children, her hope is rooted in her advocacy. BE NOLA’s work supports Black educators, providing professional development and advocating for policies centering their expertise and needs. She insists on a holistic approach: mental health support for students and teachers, equitable funding, and intentional policy interventions.

Advocates said solutions to climate-related school disruptions must be as varied as the disasters themselves. A wildfire that burns down a campus requires a different response than extreme heat or persistent poor air quality. Experts say districts should be thinking not only about rebuilding but also about readiness. That means upgrading ventilation systems so buildings are safer during smoke events, mapping out which community centers or gyms could serve as temporary classrooms, and planning for hybrid or remote learning when in-person instruction isn’t possible.

On the financial side, groups like UndauntedK12 are urging schools to make their buildings more resilient by installing solar panels, electric bus fleets, and heat pumps. These upgrades reduce emissions and save districts money in the long run. Meanwhile, some school systems are getting more flexible, shifting school start dates to avoid peak fire or hurricane seasons or adding extra learning hours after closures. But resilience isn’t just about infrastructure, and the burden extends beyond students. 

After disasters, school staff act as first responders. As Davis wrote in 2022, it is the custodians who remove debris and damaged supplies, the principals who stay in the building for 24 hours while their schools operate as shelters, and the teachers who run to the local pharmacy to retrieve students’ life-saving medicine when communication is limited.

Davis’ study looked at states like Texas and North Carolina, where educators have faced mounting stress and burnout with the demands of disaster response. Educators interviewed in the study emphasized the need for proactive disaster preparedness plans that clearly define roles, streamline communication, and incorporate mental health support. Schools, the research concluded, must establish comprehensive emergency strategies that acknowledge and address the toll these crises take on teachers and staff.

Meanwhile, the mental health support students and educators need remains out of reach for many. According to the Society for Research in Child Development, up to 50% of children report post-traumatic stress symptoms after disasters. But culturally competent care is hard to find. Only 3% of psychologists in the U.S. are Black, despite the unique systemic and cultural factors shaping Black families’ mental health experiences.

At the end of the day, Davis said at the core of recovery work is the need for basic dignity. People don’t want to be treated like statistics. “They don’t want to feel as though they are animals, and sometimes animals are even treated better,” she said. 

“You can rebuild a building,” she added. “But if you don’t rebuild trust, safety, and support for the people inside it, you haven’t rebuilt a school.”