During the week, Derek Cooper, superintendent of Happy Camp Union Elementary, lives in a trailer behind the school. On weekends, he drives 14 hours roundtrip to his home in Lake Tahoe.

He’d prefer to live full-time in the Siskiyou County community where he works, but after a fire ravaged the town almost three years ago, there is nothing to rent, nothing to buy, and no end in sight.

“Even if there was someplace to live here, I would not want to rent a house that a family could live in,” Cooper said. “So many people are still struggling.”

Long after the smoke has cleared in Happy Camp, school staff, students and families are grappling with trauma, uncertainty and a dire housing shortage that’s left many to suffer from long-term homelessness.

The town of 1,000 lost nearly 200 homes in the Slater fire, which tore through the heavily forested area near the Oregon border — much of which is Karuk tribal land — in fall 2020. Although some residents have brought in trailers, many have resorted to couch-surfing, doubling up with other families or living outdoors.

At Happy Camp Elementary, nearly half of the school’s families and staff lost their homes, a situation mirrored in other parts of California. Small towns devastated by wildfires are facing myriad hardships as they try to rebuild and recover.

The damage has played out in lower attendance rates, lower test scores, higher staff turnover and extreme difficulty in recruiting new teachers. In Happy Camp, for example, nearly half the student body was chronically absent the year following the fire.

“Homelessness is tough anywhere, but in rural areas, it’s a whole different ballgame,” said Tim Taylor, director of the Small School Districts’ Association. “There’s no social services. The school is the social service. And schools just don’t have the resources they need.”

Happy Camp school staff members have done their best to serve their students and families. Even while many staff members were experiencing their own housing challenges, they managed to secure half a dozen trailers, host an 11-week class for parents on helping their children cope with trauma, organized clothing drives and held fundraisers to buy furniture, food, gas and other essentials for families who lost their homes.

Perhaps the most important step was to host a barbecue every Tuesday night for anyone who wanted to come.

“The idea was to feed people,” Cooper said, “but also give people time to gather and talk, so they know they’re not alone.”

The exact number of homeless students in rural areas is difficult to gauge, but there’s no question the numbers have risen significantly in communities damaged by wildfires, said Brittany Collier, homeless student liaison at the Siskiyou County Office of Education.

Exacerbating the housing shortage, housing costs have risen sharply. Families who lost everything in a fire now find themselves unable to afford an apartment even if they can find one. A house in the town of Mount Shasta, for example, that rented for $850 a month less than a decade ago now rents for almost $2,000 a month, she said. As a result, some families have moved away, and others are relying on family, friends or even teachers for accommodations.

“People are opening their doors because there’s a need,” she said.

The state should do more to help rural schools struggling in the aftermath of wildfires, Cooper and others said. More counselors, more trailers and less red tape would be especially helpful in the first weeks after a fire. And longer term, help with rebuilding and hiring would help not just the school, but the whole community recover quicker.

The sheer volume of paperwork after a fire can be overwhelming for schools, Cooper said.

While the Department of Education can’t reduce the avalanche of emails and forms, it does offer grants for schools to hire temporary staff to help.