“I’m more nervous than I thought I’d be,” Bradbury said, gazing into the classroom. “If we can just get through the day without another big aftershock, we’ll be OK.”
Thousands of aftershock tremors — many imperceptible, others large enough to shake people from their church pews — have rattled lives in the days since a 7.0-magnitude earthquake struck Nov. 30. This week was a tense juncture for parents, teachers and the roughly 48,000 public students returning to the schools that many of them had fled in panic when the quake struck at 8:29 a.m. local time that day.
All 92 of the school system’s buildings sustained some damage. With at least two schools still unfit for use, more than 1,000 students were resuming classes in a different school than the one they attended two weeks ago. Libraries have been consolidated. And counselors from as far away as Portland, Oregon, have arrived to work with anxious children and teachers.
Deena Bishop, the superintendent of the district, handed out gift pencils to the younger students on their first day back and said that the schools would focus for now on a simple goal: healing.
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“Coming together, figuring it out, getting started,” Bishop said. “We just have to work through it. You don’t pick your emergencies.”
Dawn Wilcox, who teaches second grade, said the quake and its many aftershocks were an essential topic for a conversation on the first day back — about science and personal memory. Wilcox, who grew up in Anchorage, survived a 9.2-magnitude earthquake that shattered southern Alaska in 1964, when she was in third grade.
“I know their anxiety, and how it feels to be a child, and really not knowing when the next earthquake is going to hit,” Wilcox said. The earth is a restless place, she told the children, and earthquakes, especially here in Alaska, are part of that story. “This is what planet earth does,” she said later. “This kind of relieves some anxiety.”
This article originally appeared in The New York Times.