In the U.S., more than 9 million students school closures or canceled activities due to extreme weather during the 2024-25 school year. In western North Carolina, 76,000 students were affected by Tropical Storm Helene in 2024, with some missing up to 40 days of instruction due to flooding, power outages and damaged roads. That same year, Phoenix experienced of temperatures at or above 100 degrees Fahrenheit, disrupting school activities and creating a on learning.

Extreme and prolonged conditions like these have repercussions that build over time. Repeated closures and altered schedules make it harder for students to stay on track academically and create ongoing stress for both children and caregivers.

Such disturbances have led to learning loss, as reflected in , and the consequences often hit students already experiencing the hardest. As an on environmental injustice highlights, people of color are disproportionately more likely to live in flood-prone areas and attend under-resourced schools, with outdated HVAC systems that are vulnerable to extreme heat. These challenges, combined with unstable housing, poorer health care and limited access to reliable transportation, make it significantly harder for families and students to regain stability when daily routines are knocked off kilter.

As such disasters become more frequent, intense and unpredictable, schools and communities are going to have to grapple with these inevitable realities. Reducing carbon footprints and improving climate education are key strategies for adaptation.

For example, the Maryland Association of Boards of Education declared that in order to provide schools that are safe, functional and fair for all students, a plan should be put in place. The state also has an that brings together state and federal agencies, nonprofits and community-based youth groups to develop conservation‑focused recommendations, help teachers meet environmental literacy standards and aid districts in sustainability efforts.

New Jersey instituted and formed the to prepare public school teachers to integrate climate education across grade levels and content areas. In 2024, Colorado’s legislature approved a .

Other states, including California, Connecticut, Maine, Illinois, Oregon and Washington, have passed legislation promoting . Embedding eco-education across subjects and grade levels can prepare young people to embrace environmental stewardship. Project-based approaches like environmental monitoring, design challenges and student energy audits can deepen learning while improving campus conditions. In addition, taking deliberate steps to prepare learners for green or clean energy jobs and helping them feel confident in science and math can help ensure every student is adequately prepared for future economies.

These approaches align with KnowledgeWorks’ latest 10-year forecast, , which looks ahead at how schools and learning are likely to change over the next decade. The report asks policymakers and district leaders to start planning now for a future of education where learning increasingly happens outside physical classrooms and decisions and resources are managed with the understanding that worsening environmental conditions will continue to shape school operations and learning experiences.

Districts around the U.S. have been devising and establishing environmental sustainability offices, and some teachers unions have demanded that their districts establish or update them.

These plans outline commitments and connect resources and initiatives that can help insulate schools and districts from the ill effects of weather-related events. This might include installing solar panels and battery storage to keep schools open during power outages or ensuring that students have access to laptops and the internet for remote learning during closures. Training counselors and educators to address climate-related stress and the impacts of disruption and displacement on students can be another powerful tactic.

Longer term, as the forecast highlights, schools might consider flexible, year-round calendars that allow for quick adjustments during climate disruptions. Communities could partner with libraries, recreation centers and businesses to create learning hubs during emergencies in return for tax breaks or other incentives.

Alternatively, states might put in place climate readiness certifications that would require schools, especially new and renovated buildings, to meet resilience standards for infrastructure, energy systems and emergency protocols.

In the meantime, resources are available to help state and district leaders take concrete steps toward addressing the current and future impacts of climate change and related events.

Among them, a by Aspen Institute’s This Is Planet Ed helps schools and districts consider how to adapt to climate change, mitigate its impacts, educate young people about successful green economies and advance equity by prioritizing and involving communities that are most impacted.

In addition, UNESCO’s provides international guidelines for creating environmentally friendly learning environments that reduce waste, save energy and use sustainable materials.

Schools and districts play a central role in community stability and opportunity. Designing facilities, operations and instruction that can withstand extreme weather, adapt to changing environmental conditions and recover quickly when disasters strike will be critical. In doing this work, the people and neighborhoods that face the greatest challenges should be asked where the most acute problems show up and what support would make the biggest difference when daily life is interrupted.

With coordinated support from state and regional partners, districts can move from reactive responses to proactive systems: stronger buildings, adaptive calendars, clean energy infrastructure, climate-ready teaching and shared community resources.

Together, these steps can help schools meet immediate challenges while laying the groundwork for long-term sustainability. By acting now, education leaders can build a more resilient future of learning for every student.

Jeremiah-Anthony Righteous-Rogers, senior manager of strategic foresight at KnowledgeWorks and a former community organizer and program assistant in New Orleans and Washington, D.C., also contributed to this essay.

was originally reported by Jessica Kutz of . .

When Hurricane Helene swept through Kelsey Crabtree’s small hometown of Black Mountain, North Carolina, two years ago, its fierce winds uprooted a large tree that landed on the roof of her house, jolting her and her husband awake. She went into the living room and noticed a huge crack where water had started to pour in. The couple grabbed their two sons, dragged a spare mattress to their laundry room and sheltered there overnight.

Eventually, Crabtree and her family made their way to her mother-in-law’s home in Chattanooga, Tennessee. They later moved into an Airbnb, where they stayed for nearly a year. The months after the storm were a blur, she said — lots of phone calls with insurance and hands-on work to fix their home, and all of that while scrambling to care for the boys, who were two and five at the time.

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“We needed time to be childfree so we could work. We needed to be bringing money in so we could have our house back in order,” Crabtree, who works as a therapist, said. “The limited child care was really making it challenging. It was limiting my ability to see clients.”

So she got in contact with Silke Knebel.

A single mom, Knebel founded the National Emergency Child Care Network a few months earlier to help other mothers who might need child care in an emergency. What constitutes an emergency is broadly defined in Knebel’s mind: It could be a disaster like Helene, It could be snowstorms, like the one that brought massive damage to a big slice of the northeast, or just the need for a few hours to recharge after a particularly stressful day.

In the last decade, weather and climate-related disasters have caused damages worth over $200 billion and affected the availability of child care in the long and short term. Hurricane Harvey in 2017 damaged over 650 child care centers, permanently closing 52 facilities. The Maui wildfire in 2023 destroyed four of the nine child care programs that were available in the city of Lahaina. Last year, the Los Angeles wildfires affected over 500 child care providers, with Altadena losing 60% of its child care centers in the tragedy.

Knebel’s desire to help others when a disaster strikes comes from her own experience as a single mom. In kindergarten, her eldest son was diagnosed with a mental health condition known as “conduct disorder,” which manifests as aggressive and behavioral issues.It soaked up a lot of Knebel’s emotional and physical energy. “I feel for other moms, because I had weekends where I cried all day and I needed that five or six hours of [care] from just somebody showing up at my door,” she said.

Her nonprofit is designed to do exactly that — deploy to families in a crisis. The organization is staffed by volunteers who have undergone extensive background checks and are trained in trauma-informed care — “We don’t bring on 16-year-old Care.com babysitters,” Knebel said. The volunteers are typically deployed in pairs to families in need, at no cost.  Many of them are retired teachers, pediatricians, social workers, and mothers and grandmothers who simply want to help.

For Crabtree, they were a godsend. “The kids loved the people who came out and played with them,” she said. They would show up and have different games and toys and animal crackers and the kids were just so excited.”

In the weeks and months after Hurricane Helene, Knebel connected over 50 families like Crabtree’s with child care volunteers. One mother had a sick and disabled husband at home  and when the storm hit, she was left to figure out how to do basic things like find water while taking care of her children and partner. Another, a mother of four, was worried that if she didn’t return to work soon, she wouldn’t be able to pay rent, but her child care center had been closed due to the storm. Then there was the family whose nanny’s house was destroyed in the hurricane. Sometimes, the mothers who called — the callers were almost always moms —  were just exhausted or in desperate need of a few hours away from their kids to sort through the piles of paperwork, to call insurance adjustors, to figure out how to rebuild.

The first person to call Knebel’s child care emergency hotline was, however, the manager of a local bank. One of his employees was struggling to find child care weeks after the storm. Employers “try to be accommodating and compassionate,” she said. “But after a while, they’re like, ‘Okay, you need to come to work.’ And that’s when the real burden and stress hits families, because the child care is still not open.”

And it wasn’t the only employer she helped out. United Way of Asheville, an organization that provides disaster relief, requested volunteers to staff a pop-up child care for their employees. Also, an area school requested help for 40 teachers who all needed care for their own kids.

At the same time that parents were struggling to find care, some 148 child care centers and home-based providers had been damaged by Helene — and no one knew how or when they would reopen.

The barriers to getting child care back up and running after a disaster are immense, says Susan Butler-Staub, a senior vice president at Child Care Aware of America, an advocacy organization. “One of the biggest issues is finding a suitable environment,” she said. “If you’re a home-based provider and your home has been flooded or your home is gone, then can you find a temporary place that meets regulation?”

If a provider is able to stay in their location, there’s usually a long list of issues they have to deal with first. “With a flood, you’re going to be dealing with mold in the walls,” she said. In western North Carolina, where Helene hit, “they are still dealing with water quality issues, so you have to filter the water before you can give it to children.”

But even when facilities recover, paying for child care can become too much for families. Crabtree, who utilized child care volunteers mostly to assist while she rebuilt her house, said she could only afford to pay for child care when her extended family helped cover the cost.

A few months after Hurricane Helene, Knebel was faced with another call to action: Catastrophic wildfires were sweeping through Los Angeles and families would need help in the aftermath

Knebel’s organization promptly recruited and trained around 70 volunteers and connected with mothers like Briana Pozner, who had a 2-year-old and went into early labor with twins after the fires. While Pozner’s house wasn’t destroyed by the fire, it was contaminated with lead and other heavy metals, forcing the family to move out for a few months.

Pozner and her family had already been preparing for how life would change with twins before the fires struck. She had recently enrolled her son in preschool — but then the preschool burned down. “It was like, OK, we’ve got to figure out how to get stability and figure out our son’s school.”

In Los Angeles, the impact of the wildfires on child care was devastating. Cindy Esquivel, program manager at the Low Income Investment Fund, a nonprofit that provided small grants to child care providers recovering from the wildfires, said that many home-based providers were still struggling to reopen. In some cases, they lost their homes and their businesses in one fell swoop.

Finding the money for them to rebuild has been difficult. Of the 136 grantees that Esquivel surveyed after the disaster, 40% did not have insurance. Many home-based providers also rent their homes and in the aftermath, rents skyrocketed in the region, making it difficult to find a suitable and affordable location.

Private child care providers do not qualify for FEMA funding. They can apply to the Small Business Administration for low- interest loans, but the process for approval is long and bureaucratic. Instead, a lot of funding comes from foundations and grant-making organizations. States have also chipped in, but the amount available varies by state and is usually a drop in the bucket compared to need, say experts. It’s an industry that, in the best of times, is already underfunded and operating at capacity.

A friend who had been volunteering with Knebel’s organization suggested that Pozner reach out and ask for assistance. Once the family was able to return home, “We had to get the whole house back in order with these little babies that I was breastfeeding,” she said. The volunteers watched her newborns while Pozner and her husband unpacked and organized.

Her son’s preschool eventually reopened, but it is now in its third location. Similar to North Carolina, it has been challenging for child care facilities and schools to find new homes.

Knebel is only set up to offer help in California and North Carolina because that’s where she has volunteers. She plans to expand to other disaster prone states like Florida and Texas but needs to raise more funding to make that a reality. In the meantime, however, she gets calls from all over the country, for women experiencing all sorts of challenges. A few weeks ago, she heard from a woman in a domestic violence shelter who needed someone to watch her two children for a few hours. She has also fielded several calls from women at hospitals who need someone to watch their kids while they undergo surgery. Once, a grandmother whose daughter had just been incarcerated called, in need of someone to help watch her grandkids.

Knebel wishes she could help everyone. “It isn’t really just disasters. It’s school shootings, divorces, it’s a medical crisis, just experiencing a car accident,” she said.

Lately, she’s wondered how she can tap into the network of volunteers her organization trained in Los Angeles to help families who are afraid to send their kids to school because of ICE raids. In the last few days, she’s been emailing volunteers about the potential need for deployments if child care and schools closed in North Carolina, one of the states hit hard by the weekend’s winter storm.

“We just want to be there when children and parents need us,” she said. “Especially now, when things are getting so doom and gloom.”

Located along the Guadalupe River in Kerr County, Texas, the all-girls Christian camp hosting presidents’ daughters and for its .

Now, a year shy of their centennial, the institution is at the center of tragedy.

On , flooding across Texas Hill Country more than half  of the campgrounds that span over 700 acres, claiming the of at least 27 campers and counselors. Across six counties, the death toll reached 120, with at least another 160 as of publication.

While the camp had all recent safety inspections, questions remain about whether more could have been done to protect campers and staff ahead of the tragedy.

The collection of images below offers a glimpse into the devastation at Camp Mystic, the heroic rescue efforts of the community and the legacy of the camp.

Camp Mystic Legacy in Archives