One year after Helene, NC program teaches students resilience

Liz DeMattia, director of the community science initiative at the Duke University Marine Lab and one of the leaders of the program, said the core idea of the program is to learn about resilience from nature and translate it in ways to support kids and their communities.

“It’s rooted in nature-based fables where there’s been an ecological disturbance,” DeMattia outlined. “The character, which is usually a plant or an animal, uses the roots of personal resilience to actually respond, and either bounce back or bounce forward.”

In the wake of Helene, the program is being used by 44 teachers across five counties in the state. Helene swept through western North Carolina on Sept. 27, 2024, and caused more than 100 deaths.

Sarah Laws, earth and environmental science teacher at Mountain Heritage High School in Yancy County said the county is still feeling the impacts of Helene a year later, with people missing and students and teachers living in temporary housing. Laws helped bring the “Ready, Set, Resilience” program to her school and said students created their own fables to manage feelings about the storm.

“They used a hurricane as the means of learning the lesson in the fable, or their character went through something totally different,” Laws explained. “But they learned the same lesson that the kid kind of gained from their experience during the storm.”

Laws added program providers at Duke and North Carolina State had the curriculum ready to go for her school, reducing the burden on teachers like her at a time when she was still getting ready for school without power. She emphasized being able to look at the hurricane from the lens of animals and plants adapting to storms makes students feel less alone.

“Also, this isn’t new,” Laws pointed out. “This is something that has taken place over the course of the entire history of the planet, and it’s something that will happen again, but it’s OK, because life always finds a way and continues.”

Related: OPINION: Where Western NC stands a year after Hurricane Helene