After Helene, schools were closed for a week in rural Smyth County. Educators kept working to make sure families had needed resources.

Before the remnants of Hurricane Helene toppled trees and flooded homes across nine localities in Southwest Virginia, Rachel Davis was planning to take her students on a field trip.

The first graders at Sugar Grove Elementary School were excited to visit Hungry Mother State Park for a “critter crawl” on Sept. 26, but the trip was postponed due to the ominous weather that was forecast. Davis told her 12 students that since they couldn’t go on the trip, they could bring their stuffed animals to school and talk about them.

“We left on a Wednesday” expecting to see each other the next day, she said. Then Helene carved its way through Appalachia , shutting down schools for more than a week.

Sugar Grove, a rural Smyth County community of about 600 people, was virtually cut off from the surrounding areas for days after the storm. There’s no cellular signal in Sugar Grove, located in a valley surrounded by mountain peaks, and residents rely on Wi-Fi to make calls on their cellphones. With power out, there was no internet, either. Many of the roads into the community were blocked by washed-out asphalt, or the downed trees that had knocked out power.

At Brookside Baptist Church, where local first responders set up a shelter in the fellowship hall, one of Davis’ students was still thinking about the canceled field trip a week later.

“Are we still going to bring our stuffed animals?” the girl asked.

“I figure most of you will still bring them,” Davis told her, though she wasn’t sure that day when the elementary school would reopen. “It will be OK. Bring them, and we will talk about them.”

The scattered population in Smyth County made it difficult to provide relief in the week following the storm. The public schools served as an extension of local emergency services, contributing to disaster response efforts by providing meals, supplies and comfort to weary families.

In storm aftermath, school communities mobilized to provide relief

For four days, volunteers at the county’s three high schools and at one of its middle schools prepared hot meals to be eaten in the cafeteria or taken to go. Pizza seemed to be a constant option on the menu, alongside pasta, chicken and vegetables. High school students packed up boxes of cleaning supplies and nonperishable food donations. Volunteers loaded cases of bottled water into car trunks almost as quickly as they were delivered to the schools by the pallet.

“We wanted to provide meals for anyone,” said Superintendent Dennis Carter, who said he didn’t want to restrict meals to only families with students. “It doesn’t matter. Just come in and eat with us.” In the first two days of the effort, the division provided nearly 4,000 meals. It did so while swaths of the county were without power for much of the week and while some areas remained under a boil water notice.

Hundreds of those meals were driven over the mountain to Sugar Grove, where they were kept in warming ovens electrified by an EMS truck parked outside.

While some residents could get to a location providing meals, clothing and supplies, there was additional concern for those who hadn’t been immediately accounted for. Maybe they didn’t have transportation. If they did, maybe the roads near their homes were inaccessible.

“If they don’t have internet, cell service, TV, radio, they may not be hearing that these resources are set up,” said Kimberly Williams, director of elementary instruction at Smyth County schools, who began assisting with the work of delivering meals and checking on families the Monday after the storm. “When we take food, then we can find out, what else do you need?”

“You could drive down the street and not see a house,” said Shawn Utt, Smyth County administrator. “But there’s 20 of them that you just passed because they’re on the other side of the hill there. You don’t know that they’re there.” Across 430 square miles, he said, the county has about 30,000 people. Beyond the dense communities of Marion, Chilhowie and Saltville, “There’s a lot of folks who are just spread out.”

Nearly 1 in 4 children in the county live in poverty. For a family of four, that means an income of about $31,000 or less.

Early on Oct. 3, six days after the storm hit, Williams and Kim Sturgill, the director of pupil personnel services, said they received a call from an administrative assistant at one of the schools who was concerned about a student and grandparent who hadn’t been heard from.

Sturgill and Williams grabbed meals and headed out on a school bus to the address near Hungry Mother State Park and were relieved to find everyone safe and being looked out for by a neighbor.

“People still see schools as the community, the hub of their community,” Sturgill said. “Lots of times, when people don’t know where else to go, they reach out to the school system.”

That community mindset pushed Carter to try to get the county schools reopened as soon as possible. It would provide a chance to do general welfare checks on students and feed them hot meals; it also would help the schools figure out who might have been displaced and in need of support.

That included reopening Atkins Elementary School, which sustained flooding of its cafeteria, kitchen and four classrooms on the school’s lower level. When U.S. 11, which runs alongside the school, flooded due to runoff from the mountains, the water flowed toward the school and the field behind it. Railroad tracks on a berm beyond the field acted like a dam. “There was nowhere for the water to go,” Carter said. The Atkins Volunteer Fire Department had to pump the water out of the building.

Church fellowship hall offered hot meals and space to be kids

By midweek after the storm, power and internet had been restored to Atkins Elementary. Along U.S. 11, there were few indicators that the county had seen about 8 inches of rainfall over the span of three days. But on winding, two-lane Virginia 16 between Marion and Sugar Grove, utility trucks working to repair power lines taken down by falling trees sometimes reduced traffic to a single lane directed by safety flaggers.

The makeshift shelter at Brookside Baptist was the community hub in the aftermath of the storm. Davis, who lives in the Thomas Bridge area of Marion, got power back after four days, and though her family was trapped at home for much of the weekend due to flooded roads, she said she felt blessed that their house didn’t sustain damage. She brought her children, Erin, 10, and Caleb, 6, to the fellowship hall to help the first responders serve meals.

“I think Erin especially realizes what some people have dealt with,” Davis said. “I think Caleb is just excited to be here with his friends and be looking at somebody other than us and his sister.”

Erin said she was worried about a couple of her friends, “because I haven’t seen them. We drove past their house, and the entire bottom of their house was knocked out.” She hoped they’d evacuated, she said, but she wasn’t sure.

Erin helped at the shelter by packing up kits of hand sanitizer, wipes and tissues for visitors to take home. She also talked and played with her friends. “I’m going to roll down the hill again,” she decided after cracking open a can of water from piled-up cases of donated Liquid Death stacked as high as she was tall.

Avery Lanier and Rowan Waller, both 10, joined her at the top of a long, grassy slope adjacent to the fellowship hall, lying on their stomachs before tipping over and tumbling down the hill in fits of laughter.

Nearby, Amber Lanier, Avery’s mother, took charge of sorting through a pickup truck bed full of newly arrived donations of supplies, choosing carefully so the group could take what it needed most and direct the rest elsewhere.

The mother and daughter had been at the shelter together every day that week. Avery has a phone, but without power and internet, her mother didn’t dare leave the girl at home by herself.

She thought the kids were handling it well because they were together at the hall and its surrounding fields instead of being stuck at home. “She’s been able to run around with kids,” Lanier said. “But this is not the normal thing for kids to run around in, like, a disaster shelter, you know?”

Power was restored to Sugar Grove after six days in the dark. On the seventh day, Gov. Glenn Youngkin arrived carrying a satellite hotspot that allowed people to get online from the church parking lot.

Lanier, an instructional assistant who works with special education students at Marion Middle School, said it would be important for the community to keep providing meals and support long after the power came back on in Sugar Grove. “Nobody is prepared to go run back to the grocery store and spend $300 to put [food] in their freezer. Nobody is.”

It will be hard for a lot of families to bounce back after the storm, she said, but she thinks getting the kids back to school will help. “That social piece, the normality they need. They need that routine, that structure,” she said.

Davis acknowledged that when they returned to school, she wasn’t expecting to jump right back into lessons with her first graders. “It’s going to take several days. The kids are going to have to unload and unpack this,” she said. “They’re going to want to talk about it. And that’s OK. We’re going to have to let them.”

When schools reopened on Monday, the lower wing of Atkins Elementary was still closed off for repairs.

Despite the chaos and confusion of the hurricane and its aftermath, attendance at each school was over 90%, said Carter. The division had already alerted its mental health service partners, including Mount Rogers Community Services, that additional support would likely be needed in those first weeks back at school.

School leaders expected that some families may have left Smyth County in the aftermath of the storm, and those students would need to be accounted for. In addition, “Some kids and families have fled here,” Williams said. The schools expect to see new students enrolling, those forced to relocate after their homes were destroyed.

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