Mountain communities find creative ways to keep students engaged after Helene

BURNSVILLE, N.C. (WTVD) -- As ABC11 continues to examine the major disruptions and learning loss caused by Hurricane Helene in western North Carolina, we found communities coming together in new ways. In several mountain school districts, students have missed nearly 50 days of in-person instruction because of storm recovery and effects from severe winter weather.

If you find yourself near Quilt N' Code in Burnsville on a Tuesday or Wednesday afternoon, you'll see a fresh look at learning.

"What we noticed most was that parents were overwhelmed and needed to get rid of their children for a bit so that they could take care of those needs, of trying to get FEMA taken care of and trying to get, you know, their lives just back to some sort of normalcy," said Allyson Heidenfelder, the founder of Full Steam Ahead Carolina, a nonprofit robotics group.

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There's no blueprint for how to shepherd a school through a catastrophe like Helene, or the learning loss and disruptions that accompanied it.

Heidenfelder is a Yancey County mom, but for dozens of local students and their parents, she's become a lot more than that.

"Well, this is great here because they're learning practical skills," said Sunshine Williams, a mother of five. "My kids are learning sewing, they're learning coding. They're able to, you know, build things and do things."

When Heidenfelder's business, Quilt N' Code, was forced to close after Helene -- and seeing the learning loss for schoolchildren throughout the mountains -- she and her husband decided to put their upstairs workspaces to good use.

"We decided we were just going to open up the doors and play with children," she said. "And so Tuesdays and Thursdays were robotics. We came in, the kids just played. I mean, we built robots, we did whatever. And on Wednesdays and Fridays, we sewed."

Heidenfelder already had experience working with students through her science nonprofit, which helps kids interested in robotics and allows them to participate in statewide competitions. For parents like Williams, that work's never been more important.

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"Well, it's just good for them to be a kid," Williams said. "They have seen some hard stuff. They do know people who have died. They do know people who have had their homes destroyed. So there has been a lot of trauma from the storm."

The result -- two rooms of engaged children -- students who have already missed months of in-person learning, able to reclaim some of that lost time.

"Two months of no school and one month of that was basically just us working on robotics here," said Natalie Freeman, a high school freshman working in after-school robotics.

When they're not putting together robots, Natalie and Gray Freeman are freshmen at Mountain Heritage High School. It's been a year that's put the twins and their classmates to the test.

"A lot of kids need that routine of going to school every day, which went away after the storm and went to starting to figure out if your friends and family were alive," Gray said.

As that routine now resumes, and the recovery continues, Quilt N' Code is a respite Heidenfelder says she's been proud to provide.

"It was someplace they could just sit, they could play, they could talk, they could cut up. They could, you know, waste whatever concerns they had and it was it was amazing to be a part of that experience," she said.

Education experts say the work being done by Quilt N' Code is an example of place-based education, an approach to teaching that uses a community's resources and people to create opportunities for students. There's currently a grant being considered that would provide similar opportunities for more students throughout western North Carolina.