What Can Educators Expect When Students Return to School?

Thousands of students across North Carolina experienced significant disruptions in their schooling during Hurricane Matthew in 2016 and Hurricane Florence in 2018. The school shutdowns contributed to lengthy recoveries, with impact on the mental health of students and staff.

Our team of researchers at the Education Policy Institute at Carolina, a division of UNC-Chapel Hill, with funding by the National Science Foundation, studied how administrators at the school and district levels dealt with the recovery process of these recent natural disasters. Although the global COVID-19 pandemic is an event of unprecedented scale, there are important parallels from these previous disruptions that can inform practitioners and researchers as they move forward now.

We interviewed 53 school and district administrators and surveyed more than 3,000 educators across 15 districts in North Carolina following these two devastating hurricanes, which caused catastrophic damage and 70 deaths.

We have captured four takeaways from their experience relating to social, emotional and academic impacts. These may inform school leaders on what to expect when they reopen their buildings to students later this fall or sometime in 2021.