When Hurricane Helene slammed into a swath of the Southeast a year ago, Rachel Smith was tracking the storm with her fifth-grade students as part of their weather curriculum.
“We had no idea it was going to end up hitting us,” said the math and science teacher at Evergreen Community Charter School in Asheville, North Carolina.
After the storm, Smith’s school was closed for a month as residents mopped up from a storm that killed 86 people in the state alone. And when they came back, they didn’t have clean water for over a month…