JUST IN: THE ASHEVILLE NC COMMUNITY STRONGEST BRIDGE BREAK DOWM MANY LIFES ……….SEE MORE
Asheville operates an independent city school system in Buncombe County, where students went back to school Friday.
Today has been a great start,” Kimberly J. Dechant, chief of staff of Asheville City Schools told CNN. “Teachers were engaged in lessons where students have the opportunity to circle up and talk about what they experienced and process all of those emotions together.”
The district is focusing on its students’ mental well-being after everything they’ve been through, Asheville City Schools Superintendent Maggie Fehrman said.
We learned from Covid that we can’t just jump back in like everything’s normal,” she told CNN’s Amara Walker on Sunday. “So, we’ve developed lessons that are focusing on mental health, allowing students to share and express their feelings on what happened and how they’re going to move forward.
Helene pummeled western North Carolina as a tropical storm almost exactly one month ago, causing devastating flood damage.
Over a three-day span, the storm dumped so much water over the southern Appalachians that it became a catastrophic, once-in-1,000 year rainfall event for the region, the National Weather Service said.