This is a heartening story about the schools in Wine Country in California, which just suffered through horrifying fires.
Educators who lost their own homes were back on the job, to make sure the children had a safe space.
http://www.sfgate.com/education/article/Wine-Country-fires-Educators-some-of-whom-lost-12282966.php
This is what educators do.
“Principal Teresa Ruffoni greeted students at Crane Elementary School in Rohnert Park on Monday morning, their first day back in class after a series of deadly fires burned through thousands of homes in neighboring Santa Rosa and in other cities and towns across the region.
“What Ruffoni didn’t tell the children was that a week earlier she had grabbed a few of her most vital belongings and fled from flames that would soon consume her home in Hidden Valley Estates, a hard-hit subdivision in the hills of northern Santa Rosa.
“She was too focused on the students, and navigating an extraordinary period for education in Sonoma, Napa and Mendocino counties…
“Amid the chaos and uncertainty, district administrators and teachers have been scrambling to get schools back open, knowing it was a critical step to bring a sense of security and normalcy to children traumatized by the destruction.
“That’s why on Friday, Cotati-Rohnert Park Unified Superintendent Robert Haley gathered the entire district staff in a school gym.
“Do you want to try and reopen Monday?” he asked.
“The answer, he said, was a solid yes.
“I looked up, and front and center was a teacher with a smile on her face,” he said. “Her house burned down, but she was ready to help her colleagues get kids back in school.”
“Ruffoni, despite possessing only a hodgepodge of mismatched clothes grabbed in the dark of night, was ready to go, too.
“It felt like the right thing to do, Haley said, to help the whole county move forward.
“For many of our students, the place they feel safest other than at home is school,” Haley said. “The adults they trust more than anyone other than their parents are their teachers. That’s why we’re here today.”
Diane Ravitch's blog 
Thank you for this inspiring post, Diane. I needed that.
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This is nice, too. Florida public schools enroll kids displaced from Puerto Rico:
“Orlando is among East Coast cities from Florida to Massachusetts where officials expect thousands of new students after Hurricane Maria devastated Puerto Rico on September 20. Fleeing the island has been difficult, but displaced students have already begun to arrive—and as more families score plane tickets, school leaders expect the influx to multiply.
So far, the Orlando district has enrolled 292 new students from Puerto Rico, up from 104 at the end of last week. Additionally, the district has enrolled 92 new students from the storm-struck Virgin Islands. And although they aren’t to that point yet, Williams said the district may need to hire even more teachers to handle the increase.”
I hope they get some federal money to offset costs. They’ll be short.
https://www.theatlantic.com/education/archive/2017/10/how-floridas-schools-are-welcoming-puerto-ricans/542607/?utm_source=twb
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Teachers are FIRST RESPONDERS, too. Teachers ROCK.
“Those who cannot teach are jealous of those who can.” So there!
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Thank you!
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This is kind of interesting:
“We felt that there was too much thinking of outcomes as being the bottom line of the enterprise … and that was keeping our schools from being innovative,” he said. “It felt like a zero sum pissing game of comparing test scores all the time.”
When the Trump administration took office, a new set of concerns arose for many leaders of schools like his. In Zimmerman’s telling, there was “too much coziness between major players in the charter world and the incoming administration.”
It’s smaller charters- not the big name politically connected players. Multi-state and national charters always seemed like a bit of a contradiction in charter world with all their talk about the dreaded uniformity of “government schools” – Moskowitz’s schools are all identical (it sounds like) and there are NO multi-state or national school districts but there are multi-state and national charter chains.
https://www.chalkbeat.org/posts/us/2017/10/17/independent-charter-schools-look-to-raise-their-profile-apart-from-networks-and-betsy-devos/
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My grandson lost about a week and a half of instructional time due to Hurricane Harvey in Texas. He was told that he didn’t have to make up the time because it was “a natural disaster.” I find this surprising since I can recall at least two years in which we worked until June 30th in New York due to lost snow days because state law required us to provide 180 days of instruction.
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Texas, Florida, and California have all had devasting losses due to hurricanes, floods, and wildfires.
I think it would be a grand gesture by all the states and the feds to just cancel all testing for this school year.
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Here in Florida the governor shut down the entire system for a week. I live in the far west panhandle, and for most of the week we had sunny weather. There was no need to shut down.
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There was a little uncertainty as just how far west it was going to go. Here in Houston we were out for two weeks
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But the testing will go on as scheduled regardless of hurricanes, fires, earthquakes, disasters.
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Near the end of my teaching career, the high school was being repainted (spray painted) when classes were in session. The fumes were horrible. Kids were throwing up in classes. California’s high stakes test at the time were about to start. I complained to the assistant superintendent (a total micromanaging jerk I called Sauron … from The Lord of the Rings) in charge of the secondary schools. I was told, in short, “Too bad! The painting will continue.”
My reply was, “Do you want lower test scores because our students aren’t going to perform well on the state tests with the headaches and nausea being caused by the paint fumes filling our classrooms.”
The painting stopped. The testing continued. The painting continued after the testing.
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I read the article in the S F Chronicle and congratulate all the nurses, teachers, firefighters and other brave individuals that put others ahead of themselves. A brave and courage group of individuals!
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I wonder if any of the teachers that lost their homes are living at those schools now.
I heard last week that the staff of the vet center in the area where the fires were that lost their homes moved into the vet center (that did not burn down) where they are still serving the vets that go there for support for their PTSD.
I also heard that some of the vets they serve are living at the vet center too and other vet centers outside of the fire area are collecting food and other supplies and shipping it to them.
These vet centers are part of the VA medical system but they specialize in the mental health of only combat vets that have PTSD. They help combat vets learn how to manage their PTSD. Currently, there is no known cure for PTSD, but victims of this mental illness can learn to manage it so it doesn’t manage and destroy them.
Why aren’t there places like this for everyone else in the country that suffers from PTSD … caused, for instance, by rape, physical abuse, and child abuse? Combat vets are not the only ones that suffer from PTSD.
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