When natural disasters strike, these camps give kids a safe place to recover

SPOKANE, Wash. — One week after evacuating from the wildfires that devastated parts of this eastern Washington city, Mareesha Backman handed over her youngest son to a stranger and took her first deep breath of relief. 

Spokane Public Schools was hosting what has become a growing part of disaster response: a day camp for children of survivors. Backman showed up that first day feeling “stunned,” she said: hot, poorly showered and underslept. Thanks to the camp’s volunteers, she was able to go to a doctor’s appointment, run errands and simply sit in the air-conditioned quiet of a friend’s home. 

“ This is going to sound so corny,” she said, tearing up at the memory. “It kind of felt like the hug that I needed was there.  And I was going to be OK, and there were people there who wanted to support us, help us, and I didn’t have to figure it out on my own anymore.” 

On the afternoon of Aug. 1, Backman, her husband and five sons, ages 16 down to 7-year-old Bennett, drove away as fire bore down on their home from three directions. In total, at least 60,000 people were forced to evacuate. The wildfires ultimately burned just over 10,000 acres and destroyed an estimated 920 structures. Spokane Public Schools reported that 169 students and 38 staff members lost their homes. So did an additional 20 students in the much smaller Nine Mile Falls School District, in a semi-rural wooded area northwest of the city. 

With the effects of climate change intensifying, extreme weather is increasingly part of childhood. And, as fires, floods and storms rise, so too have networks and organizations to support children and families during such crises. 

What’s called “education in emergencies,” or centering children’s needs in emergency response, is a best practice with its origins in international humanitarian aid, increasingly relevant here at home. Sarah Dryden-Peterson, who researches refugee education at the Harvard Graduate School of Education, said that beyond just providing child care and safe supervision, education in emergencies ideally means “creating some predictable routines and structures so that the emergency and disaster can feel more understandable by young people.” She said that can be the first step in a community starting to focus on the future again.

Spokane is a case in point. Within a day of the fire, public schools had started collaborating with national nonprofits, local churches and small businesses to offer free day camp to any family affected by the fires. Parents like Backman say the community’s unstinting support was the first step in their family’s healing. 

Related: When a hurricane washes away a region’s child care system 

By Monday morning, just two days after the fire, Spokane Public Schools had opened up one of its high schools as a resource center, offering everything from donated food and toiletries to assistance with filing insurance claims. School staff volunteered to supervise children in the auditorium and the gym; the district’s summer lunch program provided meals. 

Demand overwhelmed expectations. More than 120 children as young as 4 years old were dropped off that first day, the district reported, and the number swelled to 300 midweek. Laurie Morrison, Spokane Public Schools’ chief academic officer, said the district didn’t hesitate to pivot from its previously scheduled summer planning and professional development into disaster aid. 

“As an educator, I feel it’s our moral imperative,” she said. “When our students and their families are facing unimaginable devastation, we stand in the gap to offer even the slightest ease to their burden and to support their well-being. It’s an easy answer to, ‘If not you, then who?’”

Within a few days, Spokane Public Schools was joined by a nonprofit called Project:Camp, whose entire mission is popping up free day camps in the wake of disasters. Morrison said the group’s experience was much appreciated. “We couldn’t even get our head around to, like, play an organized game of kickball. They just brought in their expertise around child development and the structure of the day.” 

Project:Camp cofounder Mikey Latner, compact and curly-haired, said the Covid pandemic underscored the importance of child care and schools to communities, society and the economy. His organization has mounted 33 post-disaster camps in 10 states since 2021, hopscotching from Hurricane Ian in Florida to the Maui and Los Angeles wildfires to tornadoes in Kentucky. The team of five keeps track of the Watch Duty app, for fires, and other emergency alert systems to determine where to go next; they have a “rapid response” roster of experienced camp directors on speed dial. 

Jeff Baerwald, superintendent of the Nine Mile Falls School District northwest of Spokane, was shocked at how fast they reached out to him. “I very jokingly, positively call them ambulance chasers for the good,” he said. In Spokane, Project:Camp served hundreds of children at two locations over the course of three weeks before shutting down so the school buildings could be readied for the start of the semester. 

Related: Want to read more about how climate change is shaping education? Subscribe to our free newsletter. 

On a hot, dry Monday morning two weeks after the fire, more than 100 children checked in for the day at Project:Camp’s second Spokane location, Lake Spokane Elementary in the Nine Mile Falls School District. While the tweens played outside, the little kids sat cross-legged in the gym, in thrall to Abby Cadabby, the pink-haired fairy from “Sesame Street.” Leslie Carrara-Rudolph, Abby’s helium-voiced performer, had quietly flown out from New York. 

Besides meeting Abby, the kids played laser tag, petted therapy dogs and even fed some live buffalo. These bells and whistles are nice but not necessary, said Latner, whose background is in traditional summer camp. His group can fly in and set up a camp with no more than two plastic totes of basic supplies, like T-shirts and name tags. The rest tends to come from donations, and maybe a local Walmart run. What matters most, said Latner, is getting parents to trust them with their kids in a stressful situation. That means collaborating with familiar groups: schools, churches, World Central Kitchen, the Red Cross, YMCA, and Boys and Girls Clubs. 

When the recipe works right, national groups bring resources, expertise from multiple disasters and fresh energy; local groups bring cultural competence and personal relationships. “Looking at it from the small, rural community perspective, outsiders aren’t always going to be embraced,” said Baerwald. The key here in Nine Mile Falls, he said, was teaming up with local churches. 

On site at Lake Spokane Elementary, a bearded, bespectacled local youth pastor named Joel Heiser seemed to be everywhere. He was manning the check-in desk, greeting families with a hug, supervising several high school-aged camp counselors who belong to his youth group, fetching an ice pack for a 5-year-old with pink Crocs and a nosebleed. His own kids, 8 and 10, were here at camp too. 

Project:Camp isn’t designed overtly as a therapy camp. It makes referrals to local clinicians when appropriate. The setup is instantly familiar: The volunteer staff divide children into “cabins” by age and rotate them through sports, games, and arts and crafts on a set schedule. Latner references the science of “adverse childhood experiences,” or ACEs. He said he’s learned that “one of the key tenets is returning kids to a sense of safety and normalcy and routine, reestablishing relationships. So we focus on those kinds of moments throughout the day.” 

Starting in the morning, the kids do a “ME check,” holding up one to 10 fingers to indicate their mental and emotional energy levels, he said. There is plenty of opportunity to relieve stress with a game of volleyball or Hula-ooping, but also to have a quiet moment with an adult if that’s what’s needed. 

Just before afternoon snack time, Latner brought a stuffed otter to the cafeteria for one of Project:Camp’s most cherished rituals: the gratitude circle. There were two dozen fidgety middle school-aged kids, and the stuffie stood between them and a bag of Cheetos. But only a few passed up their turn to share. Most gave the otter a tight hug and offered up thanks: “for my family,” “for the firefighters who saved my house,” “for having a sleepover last night,” “that I have a house,” “that my house didn’t burn down and they were able to save it from the fire.” 

Related: How Florida quietly removed climate change content from textbooks

The RAPID Survey Project, based at the Stanford Center on Early Childhood, finds that roughly 2 in 3 parents surveyed reported going through an extreme weather event of some kind in the past two years that increased their children’s anxiety and interrupted routines, including outdoor playtime. As a case in point, Latner watched ashes land on his front lawn from the 2025 Los Angeles fires when his daughter was just 7 weeks old. 

Matthew Kraft directs SustainableED, a research center at Brown University focused on climate change and education. He cited estimates that in the 2024-25 school year alone, disasters interrupted schooling for at least 9 million, or 1 in 5, public school students. Kraft called that number “likely an understatement” and one that has “myriad” consequences for children’s social-emotional well-being and health as well as their learning. A 2024 study of more than 38,000 teens found that those who spent the most time in areas with federal disaster declarations had a 20 percent higher chance of reporting mental distress, even up to five years later. 

As the Backman family’s experience makes clear, those who lose homes or school days are not the only children affected by disasters. While evacuating, they drove through smoke that turned day to night. They saw a house engulfed in flames. The family of seven wound up on a Christmas tree farm in Idaho, crammed into their old travel trailer. 

“The batteries blew, exploded. So our fridge in the camper died. We had no running water. We had no running toilet. We were just living in a hot box.  And out in the smoke and the heat most of the day,” said Backman. The kids regressed, clinging, fighting, waking up with night terrors. It was all especially hard on 7-year-old Bennett, who is slight, flaxen blond and medically fragile, with a feeding tube. 

Backman, too, was feeling overstimulated, shaken up and often teary. Despite that, she said she felt “guilty” dropping off her kids at the Spokane Public Schools camp. “ Were we home yet? No. Did we know when we were going to get to go home? No. But I felt like our house would be safe. And other people were out there sifting through rubble and ash.” 

Backman’s family was ultimately evacuated for nine days, but she still felt lucky. Her husband, Chris, happens to work for Spokane Public Schools, in administration at Holmes Elementary, where four staff members and at least one student lost their homes. Latner emphasizes that their camps are intended to welcome everyone affected by an emergency, directly or indirectly. 

It was a Project:Camp gratitude circle that first made Backman realize the enormity of what her children had been through. Driving home on the second day, she asked the boys how their day had gone.  Bennett spoke up, she recounted: “‘Well, we just did this thankfulness circle, and I told them I was just glad I didn’t die in the fires.’ And my brain went, ‘Oh my gosh, my children are traumatized.’” Though it was hard to hear, she was grateful to have the conversation started. “Going to camp meant they were surrounded by adults who a) love kids and b) brought in this kind of trauma-informed practice,” Backman said. 

By Day 18 after the fire, Project:Camp’s team was packing up and eyeing their next stop — maybe the tropical storm in Hawaii or a flood in Indiana. Latner is working to get his organization accredited by the American Camp Association. Social scientists at California State University, Chico and Louisiana State University in Baton Rouge are researching the impact of Project:Camp’s programs on children’s well-being and community resilience.

Latner’s ultimate vision is a world where children’s needs are an integral component of emergency response, not an afterthought. He said he’s brought the point home in presentations to local and state emergency management agencies: “One of the first questions I ask is: How many people haven’t been able to deploy to their emergency operations center because they can’t get child care? Three-quarters of the room raises their hand. You could just start by, county by county, providing support for police, fire, essential county staff and hospital staff.” 

In the meantime, local organizations, including schools, are thinking ahead about the needs of the children in the Spokane area long term. This ranges from backpack drives to counseling support to school budgeting and enrollment. Project:Camp put Morrison in touch with district leaders from the area affected by the 2025 Palisades fires in Southern California to help the school district do some forward planning. 

Enrollment is likely to fall at the district’s hardest-hit elementary school, Indian Trail, where three dozen families lost their homes. Morrison and her team are starting to grapple with how they will keep the school viable for the families who stay, and ready for new families that might move in after rebuilding. 

Baerwald, the superintendent of the Nine Mile Falls district, said every child in his district has been affected by the fire in some way. He hopes to help the community regenerate just as the landscape will.

“I’m driving past this burn scar right now. I see it multiple times a day. And we’ll start seeing new growth come back but that will take some time 

That will also be part of the healing process.”

Contact editor Caroline Preston at 212-870-8965, via Signal at CarolineP.83 or on email at [email protected].

This story about Project:Camp was produced by The Hechinger Report, a nonprofit, independent news organization focused on inequality and innovation in education. Sign up for the Hechinger newsletter.

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