In late January, the state of Mississippi fell victim to the expansive Winter Storm Fern, which hit the northern part of the state particularly hard with multiple inches of ice and snow blanketing the region. The aftermath and recovery from the storm dragged into early to mid-February, as many counties and towns struggled through unprecedented weather, the damage of countless trees, and power and water outages that lasted from days to weeks. In those counties, schools faced closures and schedule delays that they are still having to work with now.
One interesting affected area in the schools were their journalism and media programs, which depend on collaborative in-person work and rigid schedules for important deadlines. These programs faced varying difficulties, with some only missing a few days, while others multiple weeks. In Lee County, Tupelo High School was affected with relatively minimal delays, as despite many power outages in the area, the school bounced back soon.
“We were only out for two days, but we did have some sizable delays,” said Shari Chumley, teacher and advisor at Tupelo. “The distribution of our magazines have been pushed back a few weeks each. But as far as production goes, we’re mostly back on track.”
Chumley explained that she felt Tupelo was a lucky one in North Mississippi, as the outages were not as bad as other schools.
“We were very fortunate at the school to not be as affected as other locations,” Chumley said.” “There were a lot of areas around us that did lose power a while. The majority of our students and teachers who live inside the city might have been without power for 16 to 18 hours if that much.”
A student of Chumley’s, Saniya Berry, added that many students were able to handle this short time off mostly well, with the school being back operational so quickly helping them to stay on track.
“Some of it was like a normal break because we didn’t have any snow or ice,” Berry said. “I fortunately still had power so I was able to operate regularly. Many of us treated it like a long weekend.”
However, things were not as easy for other schools, such as in Lafayette County, in which the area was hit particularly hard. Much national coverage and videos/images from the ice storm were seen in Oxford, as much of the town as well as Ole Miss were out of commission for two weeks or more. Over at Lafayette High School, those same challenges were faced, as teacher and advisor Loidha Bautista detailed.
“We struggled because our yearbook meets in the spring, so we went from going from missing one week to missing the equivalent of almost a full month,” Bautista said.
Bautista explained that the deadlines her staff and students were working towards have been thrown out of cycle, and are causing major issues as the semester has progressed.
“And because that deadline, we started in the spring. Now that pushes us to maybe finishing in July, which is very late. Our students are not in session in June and July, so it’s a bit of a hassle trying to figure out what can we do. With staff, we missed so much initial set up and interviewing time in those two weeks,We got backlogged and now we’re having to throw kids into games, or not even being able to schedule games because the sports continued to play.”
On her students, Bautista completed their work ethic despite the delays and shifts. The lack of power and connection to their in-school activities has out everything into a pressure-packed period, one that just now she is seeing the students get a real hold of.
“It was a struggle with all of our stuff being on our local school server,” Bautista said. “And the kids, they wouldn’t even have been able to access anything from home because a lot of them did not have power even when school returned. They’ve been willing to work as much as they can, but at the same time they’re worried because we feel like we’re back to ground zero. We had maybe three weeks of school and then everything seemed to be put on pause with no plan in place. About a couple of days ago is when we started to feel like we were getting back into the groove of things and seeing progress.”
Bautista also added that the scrambling of emotions affected by the storm must be weighing on the students as they had an unexpected drastic event cut off their time for learning and working. Getting back in school and locked in to their work was a challenge as well.
“The ice storm set off a lot of emotions that these kids don’t really know how to deal with or how to express because they’ve never lived through it,” Bautista said. “Being able to talk about it or not, such as what was home like? They were overwhelmed with dealing with the effects of the storm at home, and now having to deal with this big deadline. It was mostly like a minefield of emotions on how to get them to refocus and think positive under pressure.”
Moving forward, Tupelo, Lafayette, and many other North MS schools like these will continue to move past the troubles of the winter storm and find a foothold in their schedules of Spring 2026, as the cleanup across the state continues.
