500 Students Learned Hurricane Safety — From a Teenager
Sixteen-year-old Elise Raurell noticed her South Florida public school never taught hurricane safety — so she built the class herself. "Storm Smart" is now teaching nearly 500 students how to prepare, all peer-led, student to student.
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Nearly five hundred students across South Florida can now tell you exactly what to do when a hurricane bears down on their town — not because their school taught them, but because one sixteen-year-old girl decided somebody had to.
Her name is Elise Raurell, and the whole thing traces back to a memory she's never quite shaken.
Elise grew up in South Florida, in hurricane country, going to public school like every other kid in her neighborhood. And like most of her classmates, she never got a single lesson on what to actually do when a storm hit — how to pack an emergency kit, how to prepare a home, what to do if the power lines came down. Her real education came from Hurricane Irma, when she was young enough to be shaken by what she saw afterward: her street covered in fallen trees, her neighborhood torn up by a storm nobody had really prepared her for. As she put it herself, growing up in South Florida and going to public school, she realized they weren't really learning anything about hurricane preparation safety — even though, as she says, it's super important.
So for her Girl Scout Gold Award project, Elise didn't just write a report. She built a curriculum. She called it Storm Smart, and she designed it to move the way information actually spreads among teenagers — student to student, not adult to classroom. Her modules walk kids through everything: building an emergency kit, prepping a home before landfall, and, maybe most critically, what to actually do once the storm is happening and in the chaotic days after. She put it all online, on Instagram, on YouTube, anywhere a classroom could pull it up in five minutes and run with it.
And it worked exactly the way she hoped. Storm Smart has now reached nearly five hundred students across South Florida schools, as CBS News Miami reported, and it keeps growing, because the kids who learn it are the ones who go on to teach the next classroom. Elise's mother, Abbie, says she's endlessly proud watching her daughter build something this self-sufficient, entirely on her own initiative.
Here's what gets us about this story: Elise didn't wait for a school board meeting or a new curriculum policy. She saw a gap that could genuinely put her friends and neighbors at risk during hurricane season, and she just closed it, one classroom at a time. That's not a small thing in a region where the next named storm is never more than a few weeks away. It's a reminder that the people best equipped to fix a problem are sometimes the ones living closest to it, no matter their age.
Sources: cbsnews.com · goodnewsnetwork.org
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