Public educators throughout Colorado held a virtual meeting to discuss strategies school districts can adopt before, during and after natural disasters, as wildfires continue to burn across the state.

The meeting, hosted by the Colorado Rural Schools Alliance on July 15, shared stories, resources and advice from school leaders who underwent emergency responses to natural disasters.

Attendees included current and former superintendents, state-level officials and insurance specialists.

The alliance’s director of operations and strategic partnerships, Frank Reeves, said they had heard from multiple school districts in recent weeks with questions about how to handle various scenarios following a natural disaster.

Reeves is also the former superintendent of East Grand District 2 and was joined by the former Estes Park District RE-3 superintendent, Sheldon Rosenkrance, and Boulder Valley District RE-2 superintendent Rob Anderson as speakers during the meeting.

Both Reeves and Rosenkrance experienced the East Troublesome fire, which burned over 193,000 acres in 2020, while Anderson oversaw his district during the Marshall fire in 2021, the most destructive fire in state history that resulted in over 1,000 lost homes.

“We have some experience,” Reeves said. “No, I would say, expertise in like master’s degrees, but just in what we’ve gone through.”

The schools experienced no structural losses in these cases. However, the initial responses to the fires included evacuations that lasted weeks, smoke damage and accounting for every student and staff member. All had to be taken into account before a proper plan could be formulated.

Rosenkrance recalled that his district was forced to cancel one day of school because of poor air quality and that eight of his staff members were displaced for 45 days. Additionally, some of the district’s families and staff members were also volunteer firefighters.

“And we had to let them off work to go to work, so we had to figure that out: do they come to work or do they save their homes? Those sort of things for 45, 50 days,” he said.

Though not a rural district like others represented on the call, RE-2 experienced significant losses from the Marshall fire, which displaced over 37,500 people in the district’s area.

While the district managed to resume on schedule after their winter break, when the fire occurred, one of the first things Anderson told his school leaders is “that the rules don’t apply anymore” for that semester.

“You’re gonna just need to be there and help people with whatever it is,” he said. “So, forget about your attendance rules, your grades … your negotiated agreements. We just threw all of that out the window.”

Anderson explained that about 50 of his employees lost their homes and were given two weeks of leave to figure out their relocation and insurance options. In the schools, counseling centers, support groups and safe spaces were established and trauma response teams were deployed to offer support for students both directly impacted and indirectly experiencing guilt or trauma.

As for academics, the district modified instruction to offer flexible, phased-in transitions back into classrooms and coursework and incorporated more social-emotional learning to build resilience and emotional regulation skills.

A case study was released last year detailing the RE-2’s response by the School Superintendents Association, a nationwide organization advocating for public education founded in 1865.

Representatives with Cañon City District RE-1, Lake County District R-1 and Pueblo County District 70, who continue to monitor the Aspen Acres fire, also joined the call to learn how best to communicate with agencies fighting the fire and their affected communities and how to delineate emergency tasks among district staff.

To the latter point, districts were advised to coordinate with community partners, city and county governments and state agencies to alleviate additional burdens and manage volunteerism and donations in an organized way.

Others also asked how best to communicate across different agencies, since accurate information can change in a moment’s notice.

Those who had been in this same scenario years ago had the same answer: don’t stop communicating.

“But there was that caveat of: things may change instantly. But we found it better to over-communicate,” Reeves said. “I never heard anyone say ‘Stop communicating with us,’ but I heard plenty of people say, ‘You didn’t let us know.’”

Representatives with the Colorado School Districts Self Insurance Pool, a risk-sharing pool for school districts, shared a wildfire preparation playbook outlining preemptive, response and recovery procedures for different buildings and structures. They also explained different “property protection” options available to its member districts.

Due in part to the run of wildfires in recent years, a dedicated crisis response unit has been developed through the Colorado Office of School Safety to assist schools in postcrisis needs.

This unit features five counselors to provide psychological support for those impacted and state-level communication on their behalf. The response unit’s manager, Kati Garner, told those on the call that she is also a member of the Colorado State Recovery Task Force to act as a liaison between the schools and state agencies.

This work is currently ongoing in Pueblo County, where the response unit has worked to see what counseling is available to children at evacuation shelters, communicate to schools which students are in shelters and how they might continue to support them if their homes are lost.

“So, please know we’re available to not only provide psychological support, but I’m actually in those meetings, kind of listening as a fly on the wall and can help express anything that you all need,” Garner said.