School closings threaten disruption across Texas
On what was supposed to be the first day of school in some Texas districts, the state with the nation’s second-largest K-12 student population was in educational crisis Monday, with hundreds of thousands of families reeling from the effects of Hurricane Harvey. Teachers, students and parents were unsure when classes would be in session, and who, exactly, would be reporting to which schools, when opening bells finally ring.
More than 160 Texas public school districts and 30 charter schools were closed, according to an initial count. The upheaval threatened schools across the state, even ones unaffected by the storm itself, as families flee to San Antonio, Austin, Dallas and other cities with school systems already dealing with their own financial and academic challenges.
At an Austin sports arena being used as a shelter, Shirelle Franklin, 31, sat on a cot near her four children, three of whom attend schools in the Coastal Plains town of Victoria, Texas. Franklin said her family’s apartment complex sustained extensive damage, so she was unsure when she would be able to return home. Classes at district schools in Victoria have been postponed until next week.
The family fled abruptly with little time to gather school materials. Franklin’s 14-year old son, Noey Alvarez Jr., worried about falling behind academically. “I don’t like to miss out and having to catch up,” he said.
In Houston, Arelis Vallecilla, Chad Stearns and their six school-age children were preparing to spend the night in a shelter at the George R. Brown Convention Center.
“We lost everything,” Vallecilla, 38, said. Floodwaters destroyed their home, their truck and virtually all their possessions, including nearly $900 in new school uniforms and shoes.
Her children had spent the day playing checkers instead of learning in a classroom. They had been looking forward to the start of the school year this week, Vallecilla added, but their studies were now in limbo.
The situation recalled one that many New Orleans residents faced in 2005, when Hurricane Katrina severely damaged most public school buildings and incited sweeping education reform efforts that remain controversial 12 years later. At that time, more than 100,000 New Orleans residents fled to the Houston area, whose schools absorbed over 20,000 displaced students. Many of those children struggled academically and socially.
Now the Houston region, among the hardest hit by Harvey, may lose some of its own students.
The closed districts in Texas stretched some 300 miles along the Gulf Coast, from Corpus Christi, close to where Harvey made landfall, to as far north as Beaumont. Inland schools, too, were closed on Monday, including many east of Austin.
A number of local districts, including Houston’s, the state’s largest and the seventhlargest district in the nation, said they hoped that Sept. 5 would be the first day of class. But local and state officials acknowledged that they could not predict exactly when buildings would be safe to re-enter and roads to schools would be passable.
“I don’t think we know for sure when everybody will be back,” said Lauren Callahan, a spokeswoman with the Texas Education Agency. “It’s too early to tell how many schools have sustained physical damage.”
Doug Harris, director of the Education Research Alliance for New Orleans at Tulane University, is an expert on how school systems react to natural disasters. It will be important, he said, for the state of Texas and local schools to be flexible in terms of where displaced or homeless students enroll, and to make sure that struggling families — including Texas’ many undocumented immigrants — are comfortable turning to public schools for help.
“The highest priority has to be getting students back to school,” Harris said. “And counseling. There was a lot of trauma after Katrina.”