Homeschooling After a Disaster Hits

Some tips on what to do if your homeschooling program is affected by a hurricane (or other disaster).

   Unfortunately, disasters strike periodically and can impact homeschooling. Perhaps these tips might help some with figuring out solutions to some homeschooling problems.

Evaluations

If you have an evaluation deadline that's about to be here, the Florida Dept of Education has previously directed Florida school districts to be understanding and give extra time to those affected by disasters. Send your local district's home education contact a message saying that you have been affected by Hurricane Helene (or whatever the disaster is) when you are able and will get to the evaluation when you are able. Then you can work on what you need to without worrying so over the coming deadline.

Home education contact link

Once you get the evaluation done and send it in, the district should accept the evaluation and your home education program should be fine.


Portfolio Records

If you have lost your portfolio records in the disaster and you aren't far into your school year, make a note in your new records that previous records were lost during the disaster, and start keeping new records from this point forward; you'll have enough by the end of your school year for an evaluation.

If you have lost records for most of your school year, and you are now near the end of your school year--you may need to try to re-create at least a portion of your records. Mark them saying "some records lost due to Hurricane Helene" (or whatever the disaster was).

Titles of reading materials should be easy to recreate if you can remember a few titles used throughout the year.

If you can get access to duplicates of materials that were lost or are too damaged to use, try making a copy of the table of contents pages to mark, as best you can, to show the parts that were used; put the words "Log of Educational Activities" on it to show that you have a Log.
If you can't get duplicates to help, consider making a list of all the educational activities that you can remember--list experiments, field trips, art works, projects, etc.--to serve as a "better than nothing" Log of Educational activities.

Samples of educational materials made or created by the student? If these are lost, you might be able to borrow duplicate materials and take photos of a few pages that were used previously. Try reaching out to the curriculum company, if you used published or online curriculum, and ask for copies of a few lessons used. If you saved a camera or phone with a built-in camera or perhaps saved some photos to a social media account, see if any of those could serve as samples of educational activities done. Or ask and see if anyone you know might have some photos of activities the kids participated in.


Lost Curriculum You Were Still Planning to Use?

If you have lost homeschooling materials, reach out to the curriculum providers. Several curriculum companies have previously provided low/no cost replacements to disaster victims upon polite request and information about what happened.

HSLDA has a disaster relief program that provides funds for curriculum but also for household goods and emergency needs such as displacement costs, meals, diapers, etc. but only for those not receiving funds from the state, and doing most of the homeschooling at home. See How to Apply for details.
Those who want to donate to help this funding can see  How to Help.

The Florida Parent Educator Association also has a disaster relief fund. Donors and those in need of assistance can reach out here.


Current homeschooling

If you are busy in disaster survival mode or cleanup after the disaster, you could choose to count that work as life skills for your children for the immediate time period. Getting back to homeschooling of some kind as soon as you can may help with the children's mental and emotional well-being but if that can't be done right away, just do what you can.

When we were hit by two hurricanes in a row within days, several years ago, my children were traumatized and one of them was so affected that she shook in terror whenever she noticed a breeze. In the end, we found that reading more about hurricanes and how to better prepare for them helped ease their tensions and recover from the disastrous effects.

This page on hurricanes for kids might be a place to begin.