. Florence affected 35 school districts in 34 counties ― about a third of North Carolina’s students. Six hundred public schools, serving a total of 340,000 students, missed a week or more of classes. Five thousand students became homeless as a result of the storm.A boat makes it way past flooded property after Hurricane Florence past through Wallace, in North Carolina on Friday, Sept. 21, 2018.
“We had to talk about the fact that the kids had been through trauma,” Smith said. “The ones that stayed, some of them had a tree fall on their house while they were in it. Some of them couldn’t get back for days, and then when they got back, they’d lost everything.” “Even if they didn’t end up losing that many days of school, they’re dealing with these stressors that could really end up affecting their schooling in indirect ways,” Randall said.Randall, using 85 censuses that spanned 1969 to 2012, found that socioeconomically disadvantaged children who experience high rainfall in early life tend to have lower educational outcomes. In West and Central Africa, low rainfall was also negatively associated with educational attainment.
“People were repairing from Matthew, and then Florence came, and it just completely wiped them out,” said McDougal.in 2016, and the storm’s intensity took everyone by surprise. Students’ houses flooded, and entire roads disappeared. Fairmont had an influx of students this year, Prater said, after attendance at nearby South Robeson HighStudents in impacted counties receive free breakfast and lunch, but Prater said that even without the program, about 85% of his students would qualify for free meals.
Ramirez-Perez is proud of his grades, and plans on going to North Carolina Agricultural and Technical State University for engineering. “Obviously with a short year, it makes it difficult for a child to get what they need,” principal Ronald Prater said. “There’s been a lot of disadvantages to these kids that’s not of their own making. They don’t have control over it, and we don’t either.”