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On the eastern side of the Blue Ridge Mountains, students from a school that flooded when the remnants of Hurricane Helene blew through are going back to class, and they're lucky. In North Carolina, more than 50,000 students have been out of school for more than two weeks. And in Asheville, schools are expected to remain closed through the end of the month because they have no water. Liz Schlemmer from member station WUNC spent some time with the students who are getting back to more normal rhythms of life.
LIZ SCHLEMMER, BYLINE: The hallways of Pleasant Gardens Elementary in Marion, North Carolina, are starting to sound back to normal. Students in Kelly Phillips' kindergarten class shared what they did while they were out of school. It was not normal.
TESSA MYER: I went to check on my family, and a tree fell on our chicken coop. But our chickens are OK, though.
CLINTON SHUMAKER: I went to my Nana's, and I found two Army helicopters.
MYLEIGH WOODY: I played, worked on the fence - know how to drill now.
SCHLEMMER: Five-year-olds Tessa Myer, Clinton Shumaker and Myleigh Woody remember the aftermath of Helene's destruction. This week these students were joined by 300 others from another school in a neighboring town about 20 minutes away, Old Fort Elementary. That school flooded because it's near a small mountain creek that turned into the size of a football field, says superintendent Tracy Grit. The water even swept a school bus off the parking lot.
TRACY GRIT: And then it carried it over Interstate I-40, and it ended up about a mile down the road, and it was peeled open like a soda can.
SCHLEMMER: It will take months to clean and reopen the school. The surrounding community of Old Fort took heavy damage. First-grade teacher Rhonda Tipper was anxious to see her students at the new school.
RHONDA TIPPER: I think a lot of them probably thought, I'll never see my teachers again. And we were thinking, what if I never see these kids again?
SCHLEMMER: Tipper also taught in New Orleans during Hurricane Katrina and never did see those students again because that school never reopened. She's grateful that this time, she's at least reunited with her students. For NPR News, I'm Liz Schlemmer in Marion, North Carolina. Transcript provided by NPR, Copyright NPR.
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