“Is Fitz going to help them?” asked Shelby Ward, an early childhood mental health specialist sitting nearby.
“A police car will help them,” Fitz replied, steering a matchbox-sized police car around the mound where the cheetah’s ears poked out. The rescue vehicle was one of several figurines, along with fences, homes and plastic tea lights symbolizing electricity and candles, chosen for their relevance to the aftermath of Hurricane Helene. The Category 4 storm dumped nearly 15 inches of rain on this North Carolina town late last September and caused more than $59 billion in damage to the western part of the state.
Ward and a colleague were providing Fitz and other young children play therapy, an evidence-based therapeutic approach in which trained therapists help children express their emotions through the natural language of play and toys. These employees of Verner Center for Early Learning, a nonprofit in Asheville, have held such sessions in public libraries and the church since November to help young children process trauma they experienced in Helene.
In Fitz’s case, he and his mother, Deana Lytle, fled their home near the Swannanoa River in darkness, rain and wind rocking their car. They evacuated a second time when trees began falling around her parents’ house, to which they’d fled, leaving before a mudslide flooded the home. Immediately after, Lytle noticed a change in her son: Though toilet-trained, he wet himself four times the day after the storm and continued to have accidents. When his preschool reopened in mid-October, he had tantrums at drop-off. And he refused to sleep alone. It wasn’t until Lytle brought Fitz to a play therapy session that she understood what was going on.
“That’s how a 3-year-old displays trauma,” she said. “Who knew, you know?”
Nearly six months after Helene devastated much of western North Carolina, many young children and their families are still struggling with the disaster’s consequences. At least 55 early child care centers were damaged in the storm, of which ten remain shut or are operating out of temporary locations, according to the North Carolina Department of Health and Human Services. Parents lost jobs and therefore the ability to pay for child care. For kids under 5, the hurricane and ongoing recovery has disrupted stable routines and in some cases their relationships with caregivers at a crucial time in their cognitive, emotional and social development.
Yet disaster recovery systems regularly overlook the youngest children and their needs, experts say. A key reason is that the work of early childhood educators is not respected as much as K-12 instruction, according to Bradford Wiles, associate professor and extension specialist in early childhood development at Kansas State University’s College of Health and Human Sciences. “There’s a real perception that they’re babysitters,” Wiles said. In reality, high-quality early childhood education leads to significantly better outcomes for children, from better reading proficiency to higher graduation rates and higher-paying jobs.
With climate change worsening floods, fires and other disasters, more families are likely to face such scenarios. In one survey, 61 percent of parents and 57 percent of caregivers of children under the age of 6 said they had experienced at least one extreme weather event since 2022. And with federal disaster recovery money potentially on the cutting block — President Donald Trump has proposed overhauling or perhaps even eliminating the Federal Emergency Management Agency, known as FEMA — resources for families and early childhood educators are poised to dwindle further.
“Having early care and education as part of a recovery strategy is … one of the first things that I think really should happen,” Wiles said. “That alleviates not only the stress and difficulty of trying to parent in that time, but really frees up the adults to help their entire community recover.”
Early childhood education in western North Carolina was in crisis before the storm, due to decades of underfunding by the state and a “funding cliff” when federal pandemic-related funds ran out in June. This lack of investment has translated to low wages and poor benefits, making it difficult to attract and retain qualified educators. A 2023 statewide study found that 39 percent of educators employed at centers left their jobs, and 1 in 5 planned to leave over the next three years.
As soon as Helene hit, Vantoinette Savage, North Carolina state delegate for the National Association for Family Child Care, tried to drive to the area from Charlotte to check in with providers who are part of NAFCC’s network. She only got 40 miles west before blocked roads stopped her. Still, Savage, who is president of the Family Childcare and Center Enrichment Foundation in Charlotte, partnered with another nonprofit, Home Grown, to provide cash grants of $800-$1,500 to 78 of the estimated 212 providers across the region within days. Other organizations, such as El Telar, a local organization that works with Hispanic home-based educators, focused on assisting the remaining providers.
One of these is Jeneal Hensley, who had operated The Little People’s Place, a center with capacity for five full-time and three after-school children, out of her home 100 yards from the Swannanoa River since 2011. The mobile home, which she and her husband were only two payments away from paying off, took on 3 feet of water. The playground on the property was destroyed.
“The house is still there as a shell, but that’s all it is,” Hensley said. Yet she considers herself lucky. She and her husband received payments from their insurer and from FEMA, as well as $1,500 from Home Grown. Their church offered a mission house for them to live in temporarily.
But the process of rebuilding has been excruciatingly slow. Simply getting debris picked up has taken months, and it’s too cold and wet for the charity Samaritan’s Purse to begin leveling their land to accommodate the new mobile home they plan to buy.
One of the few things that doesn’t worry Hensley is filling up her spots at The Little People’s Place when she does reopen, ideally by summer, even though all of her families except her daughter have found other child care options. “One family, I’m really positive that I will get their child back,” Hensley said, adding, “Bless her heart, she even set up a GoFundMe for us.”
Physical damage is not the only barrier to reopening; for some educators, it’s the psychological impact. Before Helene hit, Alissa Rhodes had moved homes in Swannanoa and was only taking in children on a drop-in basis until she could get a new license. She’s reluctant to restart that process because of the needs of her own children, 10 and 13, who since Helene have suffered from severe storm-related anxiety. Instead, she has been volunteering with Savage’s Family Childcare and Center Enrichment Foundation, helping other providers reopen, and has sometimes taken over slots in a substitute pool the foundation set up, in which licensed educators take over for a few hours so that the business owner can see the doctor, attend counseling or run errands.
There have been some efforts to help. The foundation recently received a $10,000 grant from BlueCross BlueShield of North Carolina to provide mental health for the team, including Savage and Rhodes. At Verner, the clinician team made sure that teachers received a week of training in resilience and coregulating techniques before the center reopened, to prepare them for the return of traumatized parents and students.
Every week that early childhood education centers stayed closed, parents like Lytle had to balance child care with the work of recovery. The first weeks after the storm, Lytle was always on the go: procuring and distributing supplies, mucking out damaged buildings or coordinating with the Swannanoa Grassroots Alliance, a community-led resource and information hub. “We would leave to just make a run to go get supplies that would turn into being gone for five hours,” she said.
Family members watched over Fitz. While the Montessori preschool he’d been attending in downtown Asheville suffered no direct damage in the storm, Helene destroyed the city’s water system, and the state’s guidance on how to reopen safely using alternative potable water sources was unclear, providers say. Fitz’s preschool eventually reopened on Oct. 23, nearly a month after the storm.
But he had such severe crying fits that Lytle would sob in the car after drop-off. She consulted with his teachers, who suggested creating a send-off ritual in which they “blast back together.” It helped, and by Christmas break, the tears had stopped. “He doesn’t need to be as attached to me all the time,” Lytle said. “Before, I couldn’t sit in another room; I couldn’t sit at my desk and work. I had to sit with him with my laptop beside him.”
Even parents whose experiences of the storm were far less harrowing faced disruptions as centers took time to reopen. Kaitlin Swords moved with her family into her mother-in-law’s home in Atlanta until the schools reopened. Grateful that her 5-year-old’s Asheville preschool had paused tuition payments, she enrolled him in a half-day forest school in their new city.
She returned in early November, shortly after the preschool reopened. Even with all the children back, the school’s hours were scaled back, to 9 a.m. to 4 p.m., to help teachers adjust, Swords said. While she understood that need, it meant she and her husband sometimes had to take turns working at night to make up for the lost hours.
Wiles, of Kansas State University, said that disasters can offer communities an opportunity to create change. “As awful as it sounds, after a disaster is the best time,” he said. “It really does require some subsidy from the community, because the state and federal governments aren’t going to do it.”
The state’s response so far to Helene bears this out. In its first two relief bills for Helene, the North Carolina General Assembly only allocated $10 million for early childhood education out of a combined $877 million. That’s despite the Office of State Budget and Management estimating that repairs to damaged centers alone will require at least $12 million to rebuild. In an email, state Rep. Eric Ager of Buncombe County wrote that “funding for childcare approved by the NC General Assembly to date is insufficient,” calling the issue one that lawmakers haven’t seemed to be able to resolve at the state level. Any future funding for FEMA and Head Start (the federal preschool program for low-income families) is uncertain as both programs have become targets of the Trump administration.
Meanwhile, Lytle is reassessing her own life. Before the storm, she was a wellness coach and a freelance social media manager. But she said the misinformation and political division on social media has made it hard for her to spend much time on it. As for the coaching, she is blunt: “I am not well, and I can’t tell other people how to be well.”
Instead, she focuses on helping the community. “Randomly, somebody will offer to pay a light bill, or someone will offer to pay us something,” she said.
Fitz attends his preschool on a scholarship, one she hopes will extend to next year. “Otherwise, he’ll just be hanging out with me every day until he goes to kindergarten,” she said.
This story was first published in the Hechinger Report. Read the original here.
