Climate change-fueled storms are affecting children's learning

By Jessica Meszaros (WUSF) Katie Worth (Climate Central)

This story was produced through a collaboration between WUSF in the Tampa Bay region and Climate Central. Sirui Zhu (Climate Central) contributed data reporting. Megan Martin (Climate Central) contributed interactive design.

Mounds of kindergarten toys junked up the hallway. Student work wilted on the damp walls. Tubs that once contained building blocks now contained seawater. The large Lego sign that weeks earlier had welcomed the Gulf Beaches Elementary Sharks to their first day of school now read “WE OME SHA S.”

But it was the plastic flamingos that most struck Principal Robert Kalach.

Gulf Beaches Elementary Magnet fourth grade teacher Meghan Starnes working with a student on a math problem. They're in a temporary classroom as the campus undergoes repairs after Hurricane Helene. Jessica Meszaros | WUSF

When Hurricane Helene pushed the ocean through the school’s St. Pete Beach island neighborhood, it lifted a flock of the lawn decorations from a neighbor’s yard and deposited them on campus. When Kalach arrived by police escort after the storm to gauge its toll, he found them lying there, hot pink symbols of both the disaster and the Floridian community it had wrecked.

“That immediate effect of wow, this is not just our school here at Gulf Beaches," Kalach said. “This is truly something that has affected every resident on the St. Pete Beach community and island.”

It’s been more than two months since the wayward migration of the flamingos, but the Sharks have yet to return to their school on the Gulf. Helene, the most damaging storm to hit Tampa in a century, flooded the campus with 3 to 5 feet of water, warping floors, softening drywall, and drowning the electrical system. The repairs are expected to take months more to complete.

The outdoor campus hallway of Gulf Beaches Elementary Magnet shortly after Hurricane Helene. Pinellas County School District | Courtesy

As temperatures rise and hurricanes grow more destructive, they pose special threats to children’s health, their wellbeing — and their education. Communities and families rely on schools in the wake of these superstorms. But schools have limited means to armor themselves against worsening dangers.

All eight districts in the Tampa Bay area surveyed by WUSF and Climate Central sustained structural damage from Helene or its successor, Hurricane Milton, which struck 13 days later. In total, the two storms significantly damaged at least 36 schools and other district facilities.

In most cases, districts managed to repair the facilities enough that students could return to at least part of their campus within a week of each storm. Three others took much longer to return. Two schools, including Gulf Beaches Elementary Magnet, remain displaced.

Florida has perennially faced the peril of hurricanes, but heat-trapping pollutants in the atmosphere have made the storms more dangerous in several ways, said David Zierden, Florida’s state climatologist.

“It’s not necessarily the number of storms," said Zierden. "It's the maximum strength they can reach."

Most of the heat trapped by fossil fuel and other atmospheric pollution is absorbed by oceans, raising temperatures near their surface and increasing wind speeds during storms. Remarkably hot ocean waters strengthened the wind speeds of all major storms that hit Florida this year — August’s Hurricane Debby, September’s Helene, and October’s Milton — by 9 mph, 16 mph, and 23 mph respectively, according to an analysis by Climate Central.

Robert Kalach, Gulf Beaches Elementary Magnet principal. Jessica Meszaros | WUSF

Helene’s extraordinary storm surge along the Gulf Coast was abetted by the 8-inch rise in the seas around Florida since 1950.

And storms are getting wetter. Climatologists have calculated that Helene, combined with a modest rainstorm that arrived the same week, dumped 40 trillion gallons of rain across the southeast. That’s 10,000 times the volume of Tampa Bay.

“The theory is fairly simple: A warmer, moister atmosphere, also more fuel from warmer sea surface temperatures, provide more moisture for the storm to drop,” Zierden said.

Forecasts of a megastorm-plagued future have raised questions among education leaders and advocates about what should be done to make schools more resilient to climate catastrophes — and, crucially, who should pay for it.

In the meantime, communities are paying to repair damaged schools.

Principal Kalach, a lifelong and third generation Pinellas County resident, has always known a day may come when a hurricane would slam into his school; after all, a Floridian school both named after and within sight of the Gulf is unlikely safe from its storms forever. But he has struggled to come to grips with the scale of the destruction.

“My family, we've seen our share of storms,” he said. “This is unprecedented.”

Amid the panic, a magical glow

It was late and Gulf Beaches fourth-grader Brielle Spain wanted to sleep. But Hurricane Helene’s storm surge had forced a foot of seawater into her family’s house, and every bed was occupied by possessions the family was trying to save.

"It was extremely terrifying,” the 10-year-old recalled later. “We were all crying, walking around the house.”

Then, something unexpected and magical happened. She looked down at her floor and saw bioluminescence in the water.

“We were just dragging our feet," Brielle said. "We were like, 'but don't splash.' But we were like, 'I can't! It's just so fun because it’s glowing!'”

Brielle Spain, 10, is a fourth-grader at Gulf Beaches Elementary Magnet who had storm surge enter her home. Jessica Meszaros | WUSF

She and her family stayed up all night, waiting for the glowing water to recede.

Brielle lives near Gulf Beaches Elementary, and deduced that if Helene had wrecked her home, it had surely wrecked her school, too. She spent the next few days gripped by fear that she and her classmates might be forced into pandemic-style remote schooling.

“We were crying, 'I don’t want to do home school!’ and ‘I’m so sad about our school, it’s probably going to take so long to repair!'” she said.

The storms left almost every school in the eight-county Tampa Bay area with some kind of mess, most commonly debris, missing roof tiles, puddles of rainwater that seeped under doors and days of power outages. Even in the least damaged schools, students missed a minimum of six days of class.

Thirty-six schools and district facilities sustained significant structural damage — destructive floods, serious damage to roofs or structures, and other impacts from the storm that delayed reopening part or all of a campus. The most harmed were generally located near the water, in a floodplain, or close to the storms’ paths.

Hillsborough County Public Schools, a district of 225,000 students in and around the city of Tampa, suffered the most widespread structural damage: Nineteen schools needed major repairs because Milton left standing water in their classrooms.

In some other damaged schools, students were only able to return to a portion of their campus.

For instance, in Citrus County School District, about an hour north of Tampa, Helene flooded three buildings at Crystal River Middle, forcing the school’s 900 students to crowd in with the older kids at a nearby high school for two weeks. When they returned to their home campus, those buildings remained closed, so the school consolidated some classes and squeezed others into unconventional parts of the campus.

Two schools in the Pinellas County school district, which covers St. Petersburg and the barrier islands off of it, remain closed.

At one, Madeira Beach Fundamental K-8, students were divided by age and sent to two other campuses, where they were put on an afternoon schedule, since the schools can’t accommodate so many students at once. Over the last two months, the district has raised 22 portable classrooms on Madeira Beach school grounds to accommodate their sixth to eighth grade students, who finally returned on Monday. The younger students won’t return until sometime after spring break.

The other school, of course, is Gulf Beaches Elementary. A few days after the flood, Brielle got word that she would not be forced into remote schooling. Instead, the school’s 347 students and 49 staff members would be moving into a smaller school on the mainland, about four miles away.

Dropping the normal curriculum

On Oct. 2, six days after Hurricane Helene laid waste to their island campus, Brielle and her classmates walked into what Principal Kalach called their second first day of school of the year, this one at their temporary new school. That school’s own students had moved into a third school to make way for the Sharks.

Teachers and district officials high-fived the students as they arrived. Music was playing. A large cut-out of mascot Finley the Shark stood sentry at the entrance, greeting them with a sharp-toothed grin. Many returned the greeting with the school’s signature “fins-up” sign, their small hands forming a fin above their head.

Fourth grade teacher Meghan Starnes with a neon sign behind her that was gifted from a parent to replace a similar one lost during Hurricane Helene. Jessica Meszaros | WUSF

“There was a reception for every student that came in,” Kalach said. “That really was by design, to make sure children knew how important they are to us, and that school is a place where we all come to be safe and grow.”

Brielle’s fourth-grade teacher Meghan Starnes had spent the previous two days furiously piecing together her new classroom. She’d lost all the teaching supplies she’d amassed in her 14-year career, including 500 children’s books. Some of it was replaceable: A friend was gathering donated books to rebuild her library. Some of it was not: Helene had ruined her collection of hats, and Crazy Hat Day would never be the same.

As best as she could with a fraction of the space, she set up her new room in the same configuration as her old one and stapled the same border decorations around the classroom’s boards.

“So many things are out of the kids’ control," Starnes said. "I wanted them to have some sort of peace walking into the room.”

When the students arrived, Starnes didn’t touch the curriculum. Instead, the students did crafts, read fun books and spent time talking about what they had been through. Some had come through the storm relatively unscathed. Others, like Brielle, had lost everything.

For one activity, Starnes asked the kids to make paper hands and write on them how they had shown love and had felt loved during the catastrophe.

“That was our focus the first three days back, we just wanted to make sure that the kids felt safe,” she said. “Not just physically, but mentally.”

Brielle had mixed emotions about her new educational situation. On the one hand, she was happy to be reunited with her friends and teacher and grateful everyone was safe. On the other hand, she really missed her old school.

“We were so spoiled because Gulf Beaches was right next to our house, it was like, not even five minutes away,” she said. “Our classrooms are so small compared to our normal ones. And it's like, OK, I guess I could get used to this?”

Living through natural disasters can damage the mental health of both adults and children, but children have special vulnerability because their brains and bodies are still developing, according to a report released last year by the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency. Multiple studies on children who lived through floods in the U.S. and Australia have found that while a majority of children recover from the distress and trauma of the event, a substantial portion struggle with anxiety, depression, and post-traumatic stress symptoms for months or years after the event, as outlined in a 2023 report by the American Psychological Association.

This year’s megastorms will unlikely be the last that Gulf Beaches students live through. An analysis using Climate Central's sea level tools showed the number of schools at significant risk of coastal flooding in the Tampa region will grow by 50% by 2050, unless infrastructure is built to protect them. By the end of the century, under a moderate sea level rise scenario, the number of at-risk schools will increase seven-fold.

Fourth graders at Gulf Beaches Elementary Magnet working on a math assignment. Jessica Meszaros | WUSF

Schools often serve as a stabilizing force when other aspects of a child’s life are chaotic. When those schools are themselves damaged by extreme weather, they are less able to provide that social support.

This was clear to Starnes the moment her students walked into their small but familiar new classroom. Especially the ones who had lost both their home and their “home away from home” at school.

“It was almost (like) they needed to come back to school. They needed to see their teacher. They needed to see their principal,” she said. “They showed up and our entire kitchen staff is here and our custodial staff is here, we're just at a different location.”

'Three first days of school this year'

After three days of classes at the new campus, Gulf Beaches Elementary closed again, this time in preparation for Milton. When students returned more than a week later, the staff once again rallied to welcome them back.

“Between the actual first day of school and then Helene and then Milton, we've had three first days of school this year, so we've gotten really good at that,” said Kalach.

The only other first day Kalach would welcome would be the one returning to their island campus. But Clint Herbic, chief operations officer for Pinellas County Schools, said the repairs likely won’t be finished until summer break.

So far, Pinellas County Schools has spent $14 million to restore Gulf Beaches and Madeira Beach Fundamental. District officials hope that insurance or FEMA will ultimately pay for the repairs. In the meantime, they’ve emptied their own coffers.

“We do have about $6 or $7 million set aside for contingency, which is a rainy day fund for those things you don't expect to happen,” Herbic said. “And this is the ultimate rainy day for us.”

To protect against future rainy days, the district has tried to make smart investments, installing waterproof floors and elevating electrical panels, Herbic said.

The one measure that would offer true protection — raising the schools by several feet — would require a much larger expenditure.

Robert Bunting, a climate scientist and CEO of the Sarasota Climate Adaptation Center, argues that while such outlays may be ambitious, they would pay off.

“People say we don't have enough money,” Bunting said. “Yet how much are we spending this (year) in Florida recovering from disasters? Imagine if all of that money had been used on the front end, the damage would be a fraction of what it is now.”

Bunting envisions a future where not only are schools storm-proof, but they also provide disaster services to their communities. For instance, Hurricane Helene damaged an estimated 60,700 vehicles in Florida; that problem could be solved if school parking lots were built to store and protect the neighborhood’s cars during storms, Bunting said.

Teacher Meghan Starnes, her fourth graders, and Principal Robert Kalach doing their "fins up!" school sign. Jessica Meszaros | WUSF

Who should pay for such upgrades? People far beyond the Tampa Bay area have begun asking this question. Decades of underspending on education means that the average American school is 49 years old, according to a recent federal report. A separate federal survey concluded that 54% of the nation’s schools need significant repairs or updates.

Updating schools can have a real impact on the quality of education a student receives: Research by the Brookings Institute found that student test scores rise after an investment into their school facilities. Students score worse, however, when their schools close due to a climate disaster.

“There are 100,000 public K-12 schools in the United States that serve about 50 million students and 6 million staff and teachers,” said Akira Drake Rodriguez, an assistant professor of city and regional planning at the University of Pennsylvania. “This is an infrastructure that touches lots of people, but is not funded in the way that we (fund) roads or communications or waterways.”

Rodriguez led a group of academics and activists who made the case that the federal government should retrofit schools and fortify them against climate disasters. Congressional Democrats proposed legislation based on the idea, but it hasn’t gained traction and isn't expected to do so under the Trump administration.

Fourth grader Brielle just wants her particular school to be fixed soon.

“I drove past the school a couple times, and I can't really see anything very specific. But I see how they have these huge tubes, like sucking all the water out of the classrooms,” she said. “I just hope our schools will be good for next year.”

That is, if she’s still a Gulf Beaches Shark by then. Her family has been living in their damaged home, though it has had no walls while under repair. The family has been pondering whether they should move. Her parents asked her opinion, and she gave it.

“I said maybe we should just move a little farther than the water,” Brielle said.