High school students in North Carolina have created tiny homes in their carpentry class as part of an effort to help Hurricane Helene victims who have been left without a home.
Croix Silver and Hensley England, who are seniors at Mountain Heritage High School in Burnsville, explained to ABC11 News that getting to create tiny homes for those in need made them “feel very proud knowing” they were able to help out “and change someone’s life.”
Silver and England are part of their teacher, Jeremy Dotts,’ honors carpentry class, which has been creating tiny homes for victims of Hurricane Helene as part of a “partnership between the high school and Rebuilding Hollers,” an organization created by realtor Stephanie Johnson, in the aftermath of the storm.
“It makes me feel very proud knowing that I am able to help and change someone’s life that is in need through not only school but building and just helping out those that can’t really help themselves,” Silver told the outlet.
England expressed that he “just wanted to go out and help others,” adding that this was a “great opportunity to do that.”
The outlet noted that one of the projects in Dotts’ carpentry class is to turn a “wooden frame at the center of the workshop” into a tiny home for a Hurricane Helene victim:
One of their projects this semester is turning the wooden frame at the center of the workshop into a “tiny home” for a Yancey County storm victim who lost their home in the storm. It’s all part of a new partnership between the high school and Rebuilding Hollers, a local organization started by Stephanie Johnson after the storm.
Johnson’s organization purchases “homebuilding materials” with donated funds, and the materials that are needed to build the house are brought to the carpentry class where Dotts’ class start to build “an A-frame, 650-square-foot home shell,” according to the outlet.
Dotts explained that the partnership between the high school and Rebuilding Hollers was “a perfect marriage of the two to come together and collaborate with the students,” adding that his students were all on board for the project.
Days after being inaugurated, President Donald Trump visited North Carolina and revealed that he would be deploying the United States Army Corps of Engineers to the state to help rebuild people’s riverbanks and roads.
Trump’s visit to the state came months after people in western North Carolina in places such as the Village of Chimney Rock, Swannanoa, and Asheville faced devasting flooding and destruction to their roads, homes, and communities as a result of the storm.
The Biden-Harris administration has previously been criticized for its response in the aftermath of Hurricane Helene, with some North Carolina residents also expressing that they had seen no signs of the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) or other government agencies.
