This is the first in a series of originally reported stories from Daily Kos on the impact of Hurricane Maria on Puerto Rico’s infrastructure, communities, children, and more.
Pedro Valle is worried about the children of Puerto Rico. As a father himself, he knows how hard the hurricane has been on his own child. He notes that, at just 5 years old, she has weathered Hurricane Maria with the patience and grace of someone much older. “She’s a trooper,” he says, during a phone call with Daily Kos—though he acknowledges that “she gets tired of sweating through the night [due to the lack of air conditioning] and walking up 11 flights of stairs” to their apartment. But Pedro’s concern is not only for his daughter. It extends to the hundreds of thousands of children across the island that remain out of school because their schools have sustained damage or haven’t yet been approved to reopen. In a voice heavy with emotion, he says, “children need normalcy and school can provide that.”
He’s right. And so as Puerto Rico slowly rebuilds in the weeks, months, and even years after Hurricane Maria, it is worth asking: What is the impact of this natural disaster on school-aged children? And what does it mean for them to be out of school for an indefinite period of time?
Transparency during this rebuild has been an issue from the beginning. Therefore, it’s hard to get an accurate count of how many schools have reopened since the hurricane devastated the island on Sept. 20. But this much is clear: Puerto Rico has approximately 345,000 public school students in 1,113 public schools, with at least another 500 schools that are private. Since private schools are independently run and operated, they have been able to reopen as soon as the leadership deems it safe to do so—without permission from the government. But it is the public schools that are caught in a bureaucratic quandary, which means that the process of getting them open and children back to normal is taking way too long.
As of two weeks ago, 190 schools are serving as community centers while another 70 are functioning as temporary shelters for families that became homeless after the storm. According to Dr. Julia Keleher, Puerto Rico’s secretary of education, schools have been classified into three categories for re-opening: red, yellow and green. Each school needs to be cleaned, repaired, and disinfected, after which it must be structurally reviewed for damage by the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers before it can be signed off on.
CSA, a contractor, was assisting the Army Corps with the reviews, but its contract was cancelled amid protests that the process was too slow and that CSA had provided no information for why schools were not being turned around quickly. Puerto Rico’s governor, Ricardo Rosselló, said the contract was cancelled in order to seek “more effective and faster alternatives.” The repeated delays and scandal with CSA have done nothing to engender confidence and trust in Puerto Rico’s educational system among parents, many of whom fear the government will use this as an excuse to privatize their schools. More than anything, they want schools reopened as soon as possible for the social and academic well-being of their students.
Keleher says she asked the government for additional resources multiple times in order to move the process along quickly. The school re-openings have largely rolled out by region, with concentrations of schools opening in San Juan, Mayaguez, and Bayamón. She understands the frustration of parents and teachers about the slow rollout for reopening. She has also called for greater transparency from the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers about the process.
The use of closed schools as community centers (which would mean they have some level of safety) but not as educational institutions has been particularly maddening to parents over the past 49 days.
A community fights to reopen its school
Daliana Suarez has three daughters, ages 12, 9, and 5. All of her children have attended public school on the island. The youngest two currently attend a public Montessori school, Juan Ponce de León, in Guaynabo. In a phone interview with Daily Kos, Daliana describes a weeks-long fight to get the school reopened.
“There was a visit from a district supervisor [to inspect the school] on Oct. 2. When he showed up, he noticed that [in addition to minimal damage sustained during the hurricane] teachers had already cleaned their classrooms and put branches in the parking lot so that the municipality could pick them up. When he saw that the school was in good condition, he said ‘let me move this forward with the municipality. If they can pick [the branches] up, I will open up the school as community center. That happened [the opening of the school as a community center] on Oct 12.
When community center opened, it was wonderful. We dropped kids off at 8 a.m., picked up at noon. They had already been fed lunch.
That week of Oct. 16 was really tough. I would be out all morning looking for bottled water, so that meal [the kids had at school] was important so I didn’t have to worry about cooking. […]
Then they shut down the community center and closed the kitchen. They said it was not authorized to serve meals. All of a sudden, it shut down after two weeks.
If school was safe to open as community center, how is it not safe for classes? This is beyond my comprehension.”
Suarez is really worried about schools not reopening. She is concerned about teenagers who are now on the street instead of in school, as well as the academic progress that students will lose having been out of school for all this time. She notes that children were out of school for a week because of Hurricane Irma and then were back for just a week when Maria hit. She laments, “my youngest was just starting to write and read. Skills are lost so quickly.” Suarez, other parents, and teachers put tremendous pressure on the Department of Education to reopen their school. After reaching out to the media and participating in protests in front of the Capitol, including a teach-in, the school was reopened on Nov. 2. But hundreds of schools across the island still remain unopened.
Concerns over the psychological safety of children
Psychologists say that the impact of being out of school for an extended period of time is not, in itself, cause for worry. Dr. Cynthia Lubin Langtiw, a clinical psychologist and associate professor at the Chicago School of Professional Psychology, says that what’s important is to think about consistency for children moving forward. She spoke with Daily Kos about what parents and teachers can do to support children in Puerto Rico after Hurricane Maria.
“With enough support, kids can gain [what they lose academically] back, much like they do over a summer break. So while we have concerns about what they are losing educationally and want to get back to that, emotional and psychological instability is more concerning.”
Langtiw notes that what people need after a natural disaster is a sense of purpose. While parents are largely focused on obtaining resources, children are left with nothing to do. And since children’s purpose under normal circumstances is to play and learn, providing space for them to both play and learn after a natural disaster is important and provides consistency.
“Everyone has to feel like they are doing something — this can be older kids helping younger kids to read…Each child needs to feel like they are giving back — to their peers, families. It’s important to connect in a school-like setting and do things they do in school, learning, sharing, until their physical schools come back together. […]
Seeing communities coming together and giving together helps to mobilizing entire communities and allows them to not feel stuck.”
But in addition to providing space for kids to play and learn post-hurricane, Langtiw also says that when students go back to the classroom, there will be a whole new set of challenges for teachers and the school community to pay attention to. Surviving the hurricane has meant that children have experienced trauma which they won’t be able to properly process until they feel physically safe and stable first. This has implications for teachers and school communities because children may show signs of trauma in their classrooms.
“Six months after the hurricane, a child may act out or retreat. This will be when they finally feel like they can fully start debrief the trauma (meaning they will be out of the fight or flight instinct) because they have some stability. School might be a marker for that.
Right now there is a sense of impermanence. And every single person has been impacted. There is a sense of collective grief — and that has an impact on individuals and the entire island is grappling with it. There might be feelings of being abandoned, not knowing what comes next. […] When students go back to school, we can anticipate that they will be academically off kilter and emotionally off kilter.”
There are a number of useful resources that focus on supporting children through trauma and help educators understand how to use a trauma-informed perspective in their work with students. But it’s also important to recognize that, even in the midst of this tragedy, there are a number of positive factors that are working to mitigate some of the trauma children in Puerto Rico are experiencing at the moment.
Resilience and strength in the face of disaster
Breeda McGrath is a San Juan-based clinical psychologist and a certified school psychologist who serves as the dean of academic affairs online at the Chicago School of Professional Psychology. During a phone conversation with Daily Kos, she was very clear that while children in Puerto Rico have experienced trauma because of the hurricane, many of them are also part of a community and culture that allows for resilience. She wants people to understand that the situation is multifaceted and that context is critical when thinking about what children will need in order to move forward.
“There are many things to consider and everyone’s perspective is correct in that students shouldn’t be out of school—that it’s unsafe. Missing time in school itself (along with the social and emotional factors that come with being out of school), a loss of [academic] skills, issues of sitting at home with nothing to do, these are not emotionally healthy. It’s also challenging with their parents as many of their parents have lost jobs because businesses have closed and tourism has stopped. People are also leaving with their families and kids. […]
For kids who go to [the mainland], its not migration by choice compared to someone that might consider it part of their career plan. This is a small population and the decision to leave is a very painful decision, especially if someone is leaving because house was destroyed. Kids know that, know they are leaving their grandmothers and family behind.”
McGrath says that the family-based culture of Puerto Rico, along with intense cultural pride, means that people are experiencing a sense of strength, pride, and resilience in the face of this disaster.
“It’s a very interesting time to be a kid…Even in the midst of trauma, its important for people to celebrate and have fun. When you go to the supermarket and people are eating there, they like to be together, eat together. They don’t need a space between themselves and the next person and so they will sit at tables with strangers and get very engaged with one another to find out what’s happening. Every TV ad here has the slogan Puerto Rico se levanta [which translates to Puerto Rico Rises]. People are determined to create the new from the old. And spirit here is very strong. So sure, kids are seeing the San Juan mayor wading through water to help people and denouncing Trump but they are also seeing a lot of pride.”
McGrath acknowledges that how a child will emotionally process the hurricane also depends on what their family unit was like prior to the hurricane. For children who lived in homes where families were already in crisis, they are at greater risk than children who had more stable homes. So while all of these things will have an impact on children and families well into the future, she is also convinced that the hurricane will not diminish how Puerto Ricans celebrate the upcoming Thanksgiving, Christmas, and New Year holidays. And that will be bittersweet.
“What [people here] need to party is not tons of money. It’s music, food, family and friends. The season will emphasize the true meaning of the holidays for people- celebrating, family and being together, They will celebrate- it will look different and perhaps not be as extravagant but it will happen.”
For more information on children and trauma, consult the following resources:
Education Law Center
The Wisconsin Department of Public Instruction
The National Child Traumatic Stress Network
Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration