PARADISE, Calif. (AP) — Nearly seven years after Paradise was ravaged by wildfire, the foothill town smells like pine trees again. New homes are sprouting up on once-scorched lots. Construction trucks rumble through neighborhoods. An ice cream shop recently opened around the corner from the newly rebuilt high school.
But in the town’s classrooms, recovery has been more complicated — and much slower. Even as Paradise gradually rebuilds schools lost to California’s 2018 Camp Fire, officials have found
getting kids on track academically — and recreating a tight-knit, thriving school community — is a lot tougher than just flipping on the lights at a new campus.
“We’ll get there, but we have not yet recovered,” said Superintendent Tom Taylor before he retired in May. “We’re not yet where we want to be.”
One of the deadliest wildfires in U.S. history, the Camp Fire is among the many natural disasters that have upended student learning over the past decade. Damaged schools, lost homes and layers of trauma have left a mark on thousands of children — a scenario sure to continue as climate change makes these events more frequent and more intense.
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The Associated Press is collaborating with CalMatters, Honolulu Civil Beat, Blue Ridge Public Radio and Centro de Periodismo Investigativo in Puerto Rico to examine how school communities are recovering from the disruption of natural disasters.
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The challenges that persist in Paradise are a reminder of how long learning recovery can take — and a lesson on how schools can give traumatized kids a better chance of thriving long term.
It’s also a lesson on how to balance mental health and academics in the years following a disaster. For most students, the Camp Fire and its aftermath made it almost impossible to focus on schoolwork. Schools pushed academics aside in favor of mental health, a move that most agreed was necessary but set students back months if not years academically.
“People think, natural disaster — mental health. They don’t think about the academic component to it,” said Carrie Dawes, health and wellness coordinator for Paradise Unified. “You put that aside when you have a little kiddo crying because they don’t have a house to live in. You’re not going to say, ‘OK, snap out of it. We’ve got math to do.’”
In the Paradise disaster’s wake, students found themselves moving frequently. Schools were temporarily housed in unusual places — hardware stores, warehouses, churches. Nearly everyone was consumed by anxiety and grief. Learning fell to the wayside.
Kenny Michael, now a high school senior, was in fifth grade when the fire erupted. Although her immediate family was safe, some beloved neighbors died. Michael spent months grappling with family strife, loss and stress, including over their missing cats.
“It wasn’t just a matter of the fire hitting,” Michael said. “It was all this other stuff, too.”
Once an enthusiastic learner, Michael failed fifth grade and lost interest in school, saying she was too distracted to concentrate on classroom lessons. She’s now living with her grandmother in Magalia, a small community adjacent to Paradise, and attends an online school. She takes solace in talking to friends and writing horror and fantasy stories — about fire.
But she has no immediate plans to attend college after she graduates this year.
This is typical for Paradise teens. Last year, only 13% of graduating seniors in Paradise Unified met the entrance requirements for California’s public universities or completed a career training program, compared with 45% statewide. Last year, not one student from Paradise Unified enrolled as a freshman at the University of California.
Test scores reflect the academic malaise. Among eighth graders, only 11% met the state’s standard for math. Just 18% of sixth graders were reading at grade level. The numbers were even worse for low-income students.
The statistics show that, even once the immediate effects of the fire subsided, academics continued their downward spiral.
Before the Camp Fire roared through Butte County in November 2018, Paradise was a quiet, woodsy town filled with families and retirees. There was a movie theater, a bowling alley, a pet store and a Fosters Freeze, known for burgers and shakes. Everyone loved the beer brittle at Joy Lyn’s candy shop. In April, residents celebrated Gold Nugget Days with a parade, chili cook-off and a Miss Gold Nugget contest.
Within a few hours, all of that was gone. The Gold Rush-era town was almost entirely wiped out in the fire. Eighty-five people died, including some in their cars as they tried to escape. More than 18,000 buildings burned, including most of the town’s schools. At least 26,000 people were displaced.
Schools began the long process of recovery as the chaos began to settle: locating students, finding new facilities, assessing the damage and getting academics back on track after nearly a month of canceled classes.
It’s been a protracted process.
During the 2018-19 school year, the Paradise Unified School District reported 154 closure days across its dozen schools as a result of the Camp Fire, impacting about 4,200 students, according to data analysis by CalMatters. But the impacts of the Camp Fire were far reaching, impacting nearly 1 million students across the state — 15% of all students that year — as drifting smoke prompted more than 1,600 schools to close.
California schools have become used to the phenomenon. Since 2022-23, kids in California have lost more than 3.5 million days of learning because of disasters, according to UndauntedK12, a policy and research group. And that learning loss is magnified because of the stress associated with such catastrophes.
It’s not uncommon for students to miss school after a natural disaster, either because they’ve suddenly become homeless, struggle with mental health, or both. But disaster-related absenteeism can take an especially steep toll on students’ learning, according to research from the NWEA, a not-for-profit education research firm. Middle schoolers who lose a week of school due to extreme weather actually miss three weeks of progress in reading and almost four weeks in math, researchers found, most likely due to trouble concentrating.
It’s a concern facing a growing number of schools nationwide.
In North Carolina, some students lost two months’ worth of class this past academic year because of both Hurricane Helene last September and other extreme weather events. The historic Category 4 storm damaged tens of thousands of homes and numerous school buildings, causing mass displacement and academic setbacks.
In Hawaii, the deadly August 2023 Lahaina wildfires resulted in students at four schools losing at least five weeks of learning days. At King Kamehameha III Elementary, a historic elementary school that burned down in the fires, kids lost more than 50 days of instruction.
The compound effects of missed class time are evident in Lahaina. Students’ test scores took a sharp dip in the school year after the disaster as kids transitioned among online classes, learning hubs and schools outside of West Maui. Only 29% of King Kamehameha III’s students tested proficient in math in spring 2024, for example, compared with 46% the year before.
Even at the three Lahaina public schools that remained standing after the fires, students weren’t able to return to the campuses until mid-October because of debris cleanup and environmental testing.
Students struggled to find motivation in school or attended class sporadically before the fires, according to Lahainaluna High School teacher Jarrett Chapin, and the disaster made matters worse. In the 2023-24 school year, 28% of Lahainaluna students were proficient in English, compared with nearly 50% the year before the fire. Only 5% of kids tested as proficient in math.
In Paradise, even as the town’s schools set about rebuilding damaged campuses and tending to students and families, the community faced the reality that it would never be the same.
Casey Taylor, the superintendent of Achieve Charter School, described the first few months after the fire as the “hero phase,” where the community pulled together and vowed to resurrect their town. “Paradise Strong” and “We Will Rebuild” signs proliferated.
But then a more difficult period ensued, rife with disillusionment. Fire survivors got tired of living out of suitcases, and many were daunted by the hassle and expense of rebuilding. Old friends and neighbors started moving away, bringing further layers of loss, Taylor said.
“It hurts,” said Taylor, a Paradise native whose own home was destroyed in the fire. “Your community just starts spiraling.”
Enrollment in Paradise Unified has been increasing but is still less than half what it was before the fire — 1,657 last year, compared with 3,441 in 2017. And the student body is a bit different from before the fire: lower-income, more diverse, more students with disabilities. At least a quarter of the students are new to Paradise and didn’t experience the fire.
Taylor and other Paradise school officials now advise other districts that have experienced a natural disaster, and their top suggestion is to make sure the adults are cared for, too.
“We found that initially, the adults needed attention the most. You think it’s going to be the kids, but they’re so much more resilient in the moment,” said Michelle Zevely, Butte County Office of Education’s deputy superintendent of student programs and education support.
In Paradise, the community relied on teachers to serve as a backbone amid the chaos. But many teachers also lost their homes, which meant they were haggling with insurance companies while finding new places to live and commuting long distances — in some cases, more than 100 miles — to be with their students.
“Teachers just needed to talk, or to cry, but they couldn’t because they’re in the classroom and the students were their top priority,” said Tamara Conry, a former math teacher at Paradise Intermediate School, who now works for the state teachers union.
Another lesson from Paradise is the importance of prioritizing academics even when the impulse is to drop everything in favor of mental health. The first few years after the fire, school days were dedicated almost entirely to social-emotional activities as therapists and counselors were dispatched to campuses.
“In the beginning, we did a lot of art and singing. Taking daily walks. We had baby goats and therapy dogs,” Taylor said. “We spent a lot of time talking about emotions, because that’s what we needed.”
The mental-health focus was indeed necessary. Aryah Berkowitz, who was in sixth grade at Achieve charter school when the fire took her home, two of her dogs and her family’s business, said the therapy and teachers’ social-emotional offerings were instrumental in helping her through those difficult years after the fire.
But those activities shouldn’t come at the expense of algebra and reading, Taylor said.
Once an ambitious student, Berkowitz was suspended twice for acting out after the 2018 disaster. It took her four years, she said, to focus on academics again. But she credits her teachers and counselors in Paradise for helping her through that difficult time and getting her back on track. She graduated from high school in June and plans to join the Army, pursuing her goal of becoming a K-9 handler.
Taylor remembers the first signs of renewal in Paradise, when the town became something more than an ashy moonscape. First a gas station opened, then a grocery was rebuilt, and eventually the Gold Nugget celebration returned. Even Joy Lyn’s candy shop reopened.
For Taylor, the pivotal moment came when her school was able to move back to its original campus after operating out of a church in Chico for three years. Families sobbed when they saw the new playground and the freshly painted school buildings.
The next milestone must be academic, she and others said. Teachers need to set higher expectations, and schools need to provide tutoring and other support to help students catch up. Emotional wellness and academic rigor should not be mutually exclusive, Taylor said.
It’s a lesson recovering schools are applying in other disaster-torn parts of the country.
Just two years after Maui’s devastating fires, Lahainaluna High has doubled down on college preparation, introducing an Advanced Placement seminar class last fall that challenged students with intense research projects and writing assignments. The school has also increased enforcement of students’ attendance, contacting parents when their kids don’t show up to class.
While the rigor and heightened accountability have been daunting for some students, many rose to the challenge and are proud of what they’ve achieved in school, according to Chapin, the local high school teacher.
“I think our successes this year have crowded out a lot of stuff that could have paralyzed us,” he said.
Paradise Unified broke ground in June on rebuilding its main elementary school. The 46,000-square-foot campus will include a STEM lab, soccer field and outdoor stage.
“It took almost five years before we could see the light at the end of the tunnel,” Taylor said. “But now the light is shining very bright.”
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Tagami reported from Lahaina, Hawaii, and Lurye from Philadelphia. Statistical journalist Natasha Uzcátegui-Liggett of CalMatters contributed from Denver.
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