‘Nothing short of beautiful’: Christian school teacher sees silver lining in Hurricane Helene response

A South Carolina Christian school has turned the horrors of Hurricane Helene into a “magnificent” showcase of God’s grace.

Rachel Burrow, an award-winning 8th grade history teacher at Bob Jones Academy (BJA), told The Lion her city wasn’t prepared for the hurricane’s devastation.

“A lot of times when a weatherman tells us a storm is coming to Greenville, it’s never really that bad,” Burrow said.

But this time was different.

“The eye of the storm went right through Greenville,” she said. “Thirty minutes north of us is Boone and Blowing Rock and everywhere that got demolished.” 

BJA is a K-12 school with more than 1,000 students, complete with homeschool partnerships and an international student program. 

Hurricane Helene left the school reeling as its elementary school building was flooded. The loss of power forced BJA administrators to cancel classes for an entire week. 

“Our sweet elementary teachers, many of them lost a majority of their items in their classroom from the flooding,” Burrow explained. “They lost their books. They have no supplies. They really have nothing in their classroom left.” 

Several students’ homes were also destroyed by falling trees. 

“They’ve [school administrators] sent out daily reminders and daily communication [saying] if anybody has any need, they’ve opened up the fitness center for hot showers, they opened up the laundry facility for anybody that doesn’t have power to come and get laundry,” Burrow told The Lion. 

The school hopes the elementary building will be in operation within two to three weeks. But in the meantime, elementary students are “studying abroad” in the middle school building.  

Burrow described the community support as “beautiful.” 

“Whenever you have the privilege to live in an area where you have many believers, God’s grace in the response from the Greenville community as a whole has been nothing short of beautiful,” she said.  

And it isn’t limited to BJA. South Carolinians have come together to help each other – and their neighbors in North Carolina where the devastation is worse. 

“We’ve talked to (power) linemen, and linemen said they’ve never lived anywhere with this type of response. It’s just been magnificent,” Burrow said. “You have private citizens who are donating vacation time and time and money and energy to get into helicopters and go up there [to North Carolina].”  

She added BJA was “blessed” to have minimal damage compared to other schools. 

“[We want] to draw the attention to the people who are even hurting more than we are up at Blowing Rock and Boone and Asheville and Hendersonville. We know several small Christian schools up there that just I don’t know how they’re going to recover from this.” 

If people want to help Christian schools recover from the hurricane, Burrow recommends reaching out to school administrators directly. 

“We know that God is sovereign and that He has a plan for this, and He loves us,” she concluded.