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More than five months have passed since Hurricane Helene cut a swath of destruction across western North Carolina, closing schools for weeks. East of Asheville, students at ArtSpace Charter School in Swannanoa missed 24 school days due to the storm, more than any other charter school in the state.
Some semblance of normalcy has returned. But many students are still struggling.
“We have a large number of students who hide under the tables when the wind blows,” said Dr. Sarena Fuller, the executive director at ArtSpace and the 2024 Wells Fargo Charter School Principal of the Year. “We have a line of kids in the office with tummy aches when it rains very hard,” she added. For a while, one student said a special prayer over her bottled water, fearing it could make her sick.
Six N.C. charter schools — all of them located in or near Asheville — lost 15 or more days of school due to Helene, according to a legislatively mandated report on instructional hours flexibility, approved last month by the State Board of Education (SBE). While their campuses did not sustain extensive damage, school reopening plans were nonetheless stymied due to the region’s battered water infrastructure and lack of potable water.
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“Everybody’s resilience is really low,” said Michelle Vruwink, the executive director at Franklin School of Innovation (FSI) in Asheville. “We’re starting to see that next wave of impact. People figured out how to get by for a while, but we’re seeing more displacement.”
At Evergreen Community Charter School, also in Asheville, Jen Watkins, the executive director, said she sometimes sees more emotional aftereffects in her staff than in students. “There’s some real PTSD around wind and rain and storms in the area,” she noted. “I think there’s just also a lot of trauma from Helene. People are still working through it.”
These three charter schools, like other schools impacted by the hurricane, have grappled with detrimental impacts on student learning and mental health, all amid a shifting funding landscape. School leaders voiced deep concern about limited resources and the diminished well-being of their school communities and region.
Adding to complexity, moving forward: Some storm effects are harder to quantify than tangible repair costs. On that point, Fuller has had a consistent message for local leaders and “anyone that will listen, really,” she said. “It is not now the cost of repairs. It’s the cost of recovery.”
Recovery, she added, is “so much bigger.”
Lost instructional days and compounded learning loss
Session Law 2024-51, passed this fall as hurricane relief legislation, authorized instructional time flexibility for public schools in designated disaster areas. Impacted schools may count as completed up to 20 missed days of school.
“The waiver was essential,” said Vruwink. “There was no way we could make up that amount of time.” Yet, “we also know the impact will be seen,” she added. “Kids will have gaps in their learning.”
These are the six charter schools that missed 15 or more days due to Helene, according to the report on instructional hours flexibility:
Francine Delany New School for Children (FDNSC), also located in Asheville, was not included in the report. According to Britney Ross, the operations coordinator, the school missed 14 days.
Unable to make up all of this missed time, school leaders pivoted to triage around curricular content and needs.
Fuller said she and her staff conducted a strategic “deep dive,” addressing this question: “Where are we getting the most return on our instructional minutes with the time that we have left this year?”
At Evergreen, teachers reviewed standards, curriculum maps, and instructional plans, adapting curricular instruction to what they believed kids needed most, said Watkins. Still, for some students, “it’s just taking more support to get them back to where they need to be, and that’s completely understandable,” she noted.
While the hurricane’s impact on the number of missed school days was considerable, its occurrence near the beginning of the school year was especially difficult, leaders said.
“The timing of this was really, really hard,” said Vruwink. Helene disrupted the school year’s early momentum, she added, and “it’s so hard to get all of those wheels turning again.”
“I don’t think it’s a stretch to say that losing that time in the fall is exponentially more challenging than having lost days in the winter or spring,” Fuller said. “Minute for minute, so much more is established in the fall … It’s really hard to quantify the loss because not only was it the instructional time, it was the flow of the year: It was the pacing and the content. It was the building blocks of routines and procedures and the foundational skills.”
Helene’s effects are also adding to Covid’s harm.
“Many people would probably say that students were still facing challenges from the pandemic, whether that’s mental health or learning loss,” said Ashley Baquero, director of the state’s Office of Charter Schools. “Now on top of that, they have lost instructional time and also trauma or experiences that would necessitate additional mental health supports. It’s really just a compounding of issues.”
The students who sustained disproportionate impacts are of particular concern, said Vruwink. “I’m worried most about just the non-equitable impact of it,” she said of Helene’s effect on already-struggling students.
Rebuilding resilience and mental health supports
Noting an increase in anxiety and depression among kids and adults, Vruwink is also concerned about coping, given the magnitude of damage. “How do we rebuild people’s resilience after such a large trauma?” she wondered.
State lawmakers this fall appropriated $5 million in Session Law 2024-53 for mental health supports to schools in designated disaster areas following Helene. A recent report to the General Assembly, approved in February by the SBE, showed that all of the impacted charter schools, along with most school districts, had yet to draw down any funds. According to the report, as of Dec. 30, 2024, two school districts had tapped around $19,000 of the appropriation.
Charter leaders were quick to say the funds would be utilized but that targeting dollars effectively takes time. Fuller said she had hired a second school counselor and expected to use all of ArtSpace’s appropriation, around $36,000, this fiscal year.
“It’s important for the general public to note how slow things move on the ground here,” she added. “It’s not as easy as spending the money that quickly. We have to find people, and mental health providers were already in short supply.”
FSI has partnered with a local mental health practice. “We appreciate the relief funding for additional mental health,” Vruwink said. “I’d like to advocate for that being longer-term.”
Watkins is still considering how to spend the funds. “We have ideas and plans for the next couple of years,” she said, noting that restrictions around the funding have complicated utilization.
Strained budgets and ongoing needs
Community needs are substantial, even as resources are stretched, leaders said. Some direct sources of funding have decreased or stopped — and giving has diminished.
Helene struck schools just as pandemic relief, through federal ESSER funds, ended. In addition, Buncombe County Commissioners voted in January to approve nearly $4.7 million in K-12 funding cuts, due to a local revenue shortfall of almost $25 million. The local funding cut, around 4%, will impact both district and charter schools in the region.
Five of the Buncombe County charter leaders — including Fuller, Vruwink, and Watkins, along with Ross from FDNSC and Jennifer Townley from IC Imagine — co-signed a letter to commissioners, urging them not to approve the K-12 funding cut. They wrote:
For children who have already experienced the trauma of a natural disaster, the impact of losing educational support or ancillary services could lead to an increase in mental health challenges, such as anxiety, depression, and PTSD. These effects are not just temporary — they carry forward into adulthood, impacting workforce participation and overall quality of life. In the long run, reducing funding for education will cost the community more in the form of greater needs for mental health services, higher dropout rates, and greater truancy.
In the months since the hurricane, more families are now economically disadvantaged, the charter leaders said. Recurring donations and school fundraising are down. Evergreen has also lost tens of thousands of dollars in grant funding, Watkins said, and she is currently operating her school lunch program at a loss.
Such financial “compounding factors” are a major stressor, she said. “I don’t know how we’re going to balance our budget for next year yet, to be honest.”
In Raleigh, state leaders are focused on allocating and securing relief funds, following estimates of impacts. A revised report from the Office of State Management and Budget, issued in December, estimated K-12 operational damage and needs from Helene — both direct and indirect — at $61 million and capital needs at $573 million.
In late February, N.C. House lawmakers passed House Bill 47, another round of Helene relief legislation that would allocate $500 million for repairs to roads, bridges, homes, and more. The Senate just approved the bill with some changes, so lawmakers are working to reach agreement.
N.C. Gov. Josh Stein is also seeking more federal funds, submitting a request in February that includes $100 million in additional funding for elementary and secondary schools. Funds would primarily target impact aid for displaced students ($58 million) and immediate aid to restart school operations ($38 million).
As she looks ahead, Fuller said resources are her top concern. “We’ve got the teams, we’ve got the people, we feel like we understand the needs,” she said of ArtSpace and area charter schools. “We just need the resources.”
Recovery will also be long-term, leaders affirmed, and should not be conflated with repair.
“It is going to take a couple of years to recover, and that is true for schools just as much as it is for the region,” Vruwink said.
“At school, things are repaired,” Watkins said. “The trees have been cleared. Campus looks good. Buildings are fine. The water is back on.”
“And no one has recovered.”
Editor’s Note: Kristen Blair currently serves as the communications director for the North Carolina Coalition for Charter Schools. She has written for EdNC since 2015, and EdNC retains editorial control of the content.
