As crews battle the Aspen Acres fire, schools are using their resources and summer break to offer support.

Officials set up camping and places for the firefighters to rest at the Colorado State University Pueblo campus and Pueblo D-60’s Heaton Middle School.

In Custer County, District C-1 will house hundreds of firefighters at the school in Westcliffe and provide additional resources, including a medical unit, a communications hub, food service and shower trailers.

A disaster assistance center for people displaced by the fire opened at D-60’s Pueblo Academy of Arts to provide case management, mental health and support services, relief supplies, food and basic needs, cleanup resources and resource navigation.

Fremont RE-2 School District and Pueblo County D-70 have hosted community information meetings at their schools and provided regular updates, orders and guidance from various public entities through their social media pages.

Rye High School hosted the incident management team overseeing the fire response and Craver Middle School had also been in use by response teams before shifting winds led to their evacuation, D-70 public information officer Lynnette Bonfiglio said.  

The Colorado Rural Schools Alliance, a partnership among the state’s 147 rural districts, will hold a special meeting to discuss how to handle various situations in the aftermath of a natural disaster. Examples of potential school impacts include property damage and adjustments to personnel and enrollment.

The meeting, scheduled for 8 a.m. Wednesday, will include speakers who have endured wildfires in recent years and will take place online via the video conference platform Zoom.

Some fear that D-70’s Beulah School of Natural Sciences could be damaged or destroyed by the fire or close for the upcoming school year.

That is false, Interim Superintendent Bob Di Pietro said in a social media post. He added that spreading misinformation can create additional stress for families affected by the fire.

“As reentry and recovery plans begin, we will make decisions based on safety protocols and the condition of the surrounding infrastructure, so that we can determine the safest timeline to reopen the school for students, staff and learning,” the post read.

As of Friday, all of the district’s schools were “structurally still standing,” Bonfiglio said.

Boulder Valley School District experienced its own brush with danger during the Marshall fire in 2021, the most destructive wildfire in Colorado history, destroying over 1,000 homes.

Like the Aspen Acres fire, it occurred when school was out of session — over winter break — and yielded no structural damage to schools but displaced many of its students and staff.

Over 1,000 students and 300 staff members were affected by the fire and volunteers, nonprofit organizations and social service departments provided support at Boulder Valley schools, said Randy Barber, the district’s chief communications officer.

“Local schools act as a center of a community. They’re a place where we gather, where people send their kids, so we were proud to serve that role.”

Students with nowhere to live used the federal McKinney-Vento Homeless Assistance Act, which guarantees unhoused youth continued access to public education through services and resources, while staying at friends’ houses when classes resumed.

Though no schools burned down, some suffered wind and fire damage and playgrounds were covered with ash, which required soil and air tests for contamination with public health departments. Despite the amount of work and the short time frame, the district returned from break on schedule.

The schools offered regular counseling and check-ins for impacted students while volunteers pitched in clothing for students — some of whom had lost their sports uniforms and footwear and others who had lost everything aside from what they wore during evacuations — in stations set up in school parking lots.  

While some were initially combative to the district resuming classes as scheduled following the fire, families came to appreciate the relief and stability school provided as they salvaged what could be recovered and navigated filing insurance claims, Barber said.

“Having some ability to return to normal, where students can go somewhere that’s familiar and away from the trauma and stressors, is really beneficial to their mental health,” he said.

Following the Marshall fire, the district has taken additional precautions and considerations. For its Monarch K-8 and high school, which were both in proximity to the flames and offer limited entryways and exits in the area, an alternative road was developed with city officials in case of future emergencies.

For the schools in more mountainous communities, district officials made preparations to deploy buses in low-egress areas.

In Pueblo County, school Principal Perry Rogers wrote in a July 6 letter to the Beulah community that recovery efforts “will take time and the impact of the fire will be felt long after the flames are extinguished.”

“There will be difficult days with grief, frustration, uncertainty and hard work,” he wrote.

“But there will also be rebuilding, neighbors helping neighbors, children returning to school, laughter in our hallways and Beulah School continuing to care for people, bring them together and help our community move forward.”