It’s the gray last day of September, and Mayland College is trying to throw a celebration, after a year where it often felt like there wasn’t much to celebrate.
An alien-themed, inflatable laser tag arena has taken over the campus greens, but the air feels heavy. With clouds overhead, and the possibility of rain mounting, most of the students have opted to stay inside, grabbing free food as a DJ spins up nostalgic ‘90s jams.
The student appreciation event sits in the somber space between moving forward and looking back, just a few days after the anniversary of Hurricane Helene, which ravaged this rural mountain region of western North Carolina and turned this nearly 2,000-student community college from a place of learning to a recovery center.
Not long ago, this auditorium was full of water bottles, packaged goods, construction materials, and FEMA supplies: As recently as August, there were still volunteer construction workers living here. And in the immediate aftermath, the college, from its main campus here in Spruce Pine to satellite sites in Yancey and Avery, served as a major supply storage site and the epicenter of FEMA operations.
Parking lots became staging areas for Duke Energy crews, as they frantically set out to restore cellular service and power to the region. The college was one of the only steady sources for electricity, running water, and, critically, internet, after the college acquired three Starlink units to provide satellite connections where all other communication failed.
Serving three counties across some of the most remote mountain territory in North Carolina, the college was already used to being more than just an educational institution. In rural places where universities and other larger institutions can be hours away, community colleges often end up wearing many hats, serving as everything from firefighters to health care providers.
Before the storm, Mayland played a critical role in the region’s cultural and economic development, even owning and operating a number of local businesses to help bring tourism to a region that was struggling even before the hurricane hit.
But after a once-in-a-thousand-years flood that swept away roads, bridges, and businesses, its leaders knew it had to become something even greater.
This is a story about the days after the disaster, the recovery role that small colleges like Mayland must play for their communities, and how even as people try to get their lives back on track, higher education remains interwoven in nearly every aspect of local society.
Pivoting from education to recovery
Almost all colleges have disaster plans on hand. But almost all those plans assume a certain level of cellular or internet service being available for people to communicate…luxuries that Mayland didn’t have in the wake of the flood.
The campus had a few things when John Boyd, Mayland’s president, called faculty back three weeks later. Electricity, and internet. Water from the town, although it wasn’t drinkable. A sewer system that was overflowing. Porta-potties that were shipped in, filling the parking lots.
Boyd hoped reopening quickly would be good for the community, a return to normalcy. Response was mixed from the faculty. Some saw it as a reprieve from the chaos, but for those affected most, it also posted significant logistical challenges.
Sherry Sherman, Mayland’s Dean of the Arts and Sciences, lives at 3,300 feet elevation in the Black Mountain range — so she was shocked to find water pouring into her basement the morning of Sept. 27, 2024.
After the storm, her first contact with her colleagues came four days later, when math professor Larry Shook braved the debris on a four-wheeler to check up on her. When Boyd suggested returning to class, she was blunt: “This is the first time I’ve had lights in three weeks. I can’t even take a shower at my house.”
College leaders had to make a difficult decision. The state had informed administrators that students wouldn’t be able to get credits for any courses they started. They would have to either continue the semester, or risk losing their progress.
Having to redo credits would be a significant financial burden, particularly for the college’s low-income students. (And more than half of Mayland’s students receive Pell Grants, which mainly go to families earning less than $50,000 a year, according to 2022-23 data.)
The administration decided to open up, but with significant concessions for students and faculty.
They moved their hybrid model to almost entirely online, made certain assignments optional, and extended deadlines whenever needed. But in the end, the college would have to do far more than just adjusting syllabi.
Becoming critical infrastructure
Boyd had positioned Mayland as more than a typical community college even before the disaster. The institution operates a downtown hotel and will soon run a restaurant, plans to turn a former professional hockey arena into a YMCA and culinary school, and runs an International Dark Sky-certified observatory to attract tourists.
The college purchased three Starlink satellite internet units, and set them up outside buildings. For weeks, they provided the only reliable internet access in the region, allowing local businesses to process payroll and students to submit assignments.
“Our faculty and staff did whatever was necessary,” Boyd says.
The students did, too, with Mayland’s nursing program becoming a critical source of support staff during the crisis.
When the hospital started discharging patients who had nowhere to go, second-year student Morgan McMahan loaded them into her car and drove to an emergency shelter at Mitchell High School.
Through the long weeks of work, she would often spend the night at the hospital, sleeping there between shifts at the shelter and trying to keep up with her coursework.
Volunteers scrounged cots, secured medications, figured out how to keep insulin refrigerated with generators, and tracked down oxygen tanks.
At its peak, the shelter housed 60 people.
Then COVID-19 broke out among the evacuees, and the nursing students and medical staff had to reorganize everything to prevent spread.
Through it all, the college ended up being a source for getting surprising materials to students.
“One of our teachers helped my classmate get a wheelbarrow for their grandpa,” McMahan says. “Goat milk formula was a popular request: A lot of people were asking for that, because their babies couldn’t get access to regular formula.”
The effects of the disaster
What happened at Mayland is part of a broader pattern seen across the country, says sociologist Sara Goldrick-Rab, who founded the #RealCollege movement to address students’ basic needs.
“Community colleges were created by their communities, not by wealthy donors or the federal government,” she says. “They were built by people who saw a local need and stepped up. So when disaster hits, it’s no surprise that they’re the ones everyone turns to first.”
From hurricanes to wildfires to pandemics, Goldrick-Rab says these institutions often act as de facto emergency response centers: providing food, shelter, internet, and connection, usually without dedicated funding to do so.
The Mayland Foundation distributed $77,000 in emergency aid to employees and $80,000 directly to students. When state emergency funds arrived, the college disbursed an additional $553,000, awarding up to $2,500 per student.
The requests, which the university made anonymous to preserve student privacy before sharing with Open Campus, revealed the cascading nature of disaster:
One student lost their dog in the flood, and asked for help paying for therapy, recovering from the trauma of having to talk their elderly neighbor down from jumping out a window as floodwaters swept the house away.
Another student spent weeks after the hurricane driving their truck through creek beds to deliver supplies to neighbors cut off by destroyed bridges. The truck was ruined. And when school started, they had no transportation and no money to fix it. Like many, they were suddenly unemployed, after watching their workplace get flooded.
Another student desperately wanted to enroll for spring semester but had no transportation. The foundation provided money for them to ride the $17 county shuttle to all their classes for the semester.
It’s a small detail, but it captures something essential about rural community colleges: They solve problems at whatever scale is needed. The same institution that helps coordinate regional FEMA operations also scrapes together bus fare for a student to get to class.
“We’re bad as a nation at recognizing our institutions that are our safety net,” Goldrick-Rab says. “We forget about them when times are good, so they struggle to keep going when times are bad.”
What recovery looks like
Relief came in other ways, too.
Nora Doan spent so much time in the Academic Support Center that she and other students, once strangers, became friends. At peak times, 12 students crowded into the center, running out of seats. It became an informal gathering space: a place with light, heat, normalcy. “We all trauma bonded,” she says.
The college provided support through a full-time mental health counselor, and also was able to spend $72,000 to implement telehealth counseling, as part of emergency funds awarded through an extra allocation from the North Carolina General Assembly.
Ashley Bingman, a retention specialist who helps coordinate student support, estimated dozens of students are still in temporary housing a year later. She had started at Mayland just three months before the hurricane, and says the effects are still being felt today.
“I’m seeing a lot of trauma come up around the anniversary,” she says.
What happened in Spruce Pine is unlikely to be the last time a community college becomes a center of recovery.
“The number of health emergencies and climate emergencies continues to grow,” Goldrick-Rab says. “I worked a lot on Hurricane Harvey in Texas and supported work around the LA wildfires. And of course, the pandemic. Community colleges played a massive role in supporting their communities during all of them.”
That role, she warns, is only getting harder to sustain. “It’s not one of those things they are well-funded to do,” she says. “If you’re going to talk about essential places in communities that are always at risk of not being financially sustained, colleges are one of them.”
As climate change intensifies and public institutions face greater strain, the question isn’t whether more colleges will be thrust into this position, but whether they’ll be equipped to handle it.
A year later, Spruce Pine is slowly rebuilding. The coffee shop is open again. The hair salon is back. The florist is back, although it moved to nearby Upper Street.
Still, the Ingles grocery store, a major employer for students, remains closed with no reopening date announced. Many business facades remain shuttered, or covered in plywood, as construction crews continue the rehabilitation process.
Even as the scars remain, Boyd sees the disaster as an opportunity to rebuild with more intention than before.
“You look at the storm. And, although sometimes it’s hard to think of it that way, it is an opportunity,” he says. “To create what you want, not what you had.”
WUNC partners with Open Campus and NC Local on higher education coverage.
