HALLOWEEN WAS LEILANI ATTAO’S favorite time of year. She and her friends were getting their costumes ready when a tropical storm approaching her home island of Saipan mushroomed into a Category 5 typhoon within a matter of hours, catching everyone by surprise.

Such storms are a part of life on Saipan, which is part of the Commonwealth of Northern Mariana Islands, a US territory in the western Pacific. The island had just been hit by Soudelor, an especially destructive Category 4 typhoon that had leveled homes and buildings there three years earlier.

As a result, “we didn’t think anything of it,” Attao, then a sixth grader at Admiral Herbert G. Hopwood Middle School, said of the super typhoon headed their way in October 2018.

But the behemoth now known as Yutu wound up being the most powerful storm to hit any part of the US in more than 80 years. Its sustained winds of over 100 miles per hour and gusts double that pummeled Saipan’s southern end along with neighbor island Tinian several miles south.

It turned Hopwood Middle School into a haunting symbol of Yutu’s legacy and how Pacific cyclones, their threats growing amid climate change, can continue to plague communities years after they pass.

Attao was fortunate: Her family lived closer to Saipan’s north side so they were spared the brunt of the typhoon’s powerful winds. Some of her Hopwood schoolmates sought shelter in the resort hotels that employed their parents. Others who didn’t have homes with concrete walls and roofs fled to stay with those who did.

Brydon Dumagan, then a recent Hopwood graduate, crowded with more than 30 family members into his godsister’s concrete, studio-sized apartment. It was right by Hopwood, his former middle school, and directly in the path of the typhoon.

For seven stressful hours on the night of October 25, Dumagan recalled, Yutu’s winds raged so powerful and loud that his ears felt clogged.

“It was almost as if you’re in a car that’s going about 200 miles an hour. And with the windows open,” Dumagan recounted. “You could literally not hear a single thing that anyone was telling you.”

By morning, much of southern Saipan and Tinian lay in tatters. At least 133 people had been rushed to emergency rooms and one woman was killed when the abandoned building she sought shelter in collapsed.

All 12 of Hopwood’s main buildings had concrete walls. However, eight of those buildings’ roofs were made of tin. Yutu tore them off as if they were tissue paper.

The insides of classrooms were visible where they shouldn’t have been. Buildings that had seemed sturdy were thrown apart. Computers and desks were splayed across the ground.

“It was actually very heartbreaking as a kid,” Attao recalled of the scene, “because I knew that this was going to take away Halloween.”

Seven years later, Hopwood — Saipan’s largest middle school — has still not been rebuilt.

That wait has not only taken a toll on the several thousand students, most of them Pacific Islanders or of Asian ancestry, who’ve attended Hopwood since the storm hit. It’s also fueled a long-standing perception among US territorial residents around the globe that federal agencies shunt them to the back of the line.

For Attao, now in college, that’s a familiar frustration.

“When we’re struggling, when we need it the most, our island gets overlooked,” she said. “Sometimes our people beg and beg that they need help … and no one does anything.”

Earlier this year, the current middle schoolers finally moved into federally funded modular classrooms, but the campus is yet to be rebuilt for reasons that remain murky.

The Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) was helpful at first, Saipan’s school system leaders say, but got pulled away by subsequent natural disasters in other parts of the country. FEMA’s resources have been stretched ever thinner by the worsening impacts of climate change, and now the agency faces a new challenge from the Trump administration: threats of a phaseout.

FEMA, meanwhile, said it waited more than six years to get final design plans for the new Hopwood campus from the school system, according to agency spokesperson Veronica Verde. Money for the rebuild had been provided by the agency back in 2020.

The disaster-response agency further warned Saipan and Tinian’s leaders in April that they’d lose $127 million still “sitting unused” for Yutu recovery projects if they didn’t put those dollars to work by October 30.

And local school board members spent at least two years studying whether they could move Hopwood to a safer location off the coast less affected by climate change before deciding to rebuild at the existing site.

Commonwealth of Northern Mariana Islands (CNMI) Public School System Associate Commissioner Eric Magofna said earlier this year that school administrators hoped to have the final campus built within two years.

Magofna added that administrators always knew it would take years to rebuild Hopwood. Still, he said, “I don’t think we expected it to take this long.”

Welcome to Tarpwood

With their school destroyed, the Hopwood kids shared classroom space for the first few months with students a few miles up the coast at Marianas High School, which had remained intact.

Some of them liked being there simply because it was nicer than their school had been. But a full day of learning was crammed into the morning, from 8:30 a.m. to noon, so the high schoolers could reclaim their classrooms in the afternoon.

The lessons often felt rushed and cut short, Attao said. “I just didn’t have enough time to really understand all the things I was doing.”

She recalled prior to the storm working on big projects related to tectonic plates and other science topics. After Yutu, that same class shifted to creating song and rap lyrics about science instead, Attao said. That’s what was possible in the limited time.

While the kids were adjusting to life at the high school, FEMA scrambled to install a tent village that could serve as Hopwood’s temporary home until the campus was rebuilt.

The Hopwood kids moved to the 42 drab, beige-colored tents in January 2019. They instantly nicknamed them “Tarpwood.” It’s where many of them would have to learn for the rest of middle school.

Tarpwood had a basketball court, former students say, but not much else. No cafeteria, no baseball or soccer fields — no shaded areas to escape Saipan’s intense tropical sun and heat.

During recess and lunch hours, kids often begged teachers to stay inside while those instructors worked on their lesson plans. The tents had lights and air conditioning but the power would sometimes fail, forcing classes to move outside.

There were none of the decorations that teachers typically use to make their classrooms feel welcoming, they said — just desks, chairs, an erasable white board, and a projector.

“It low-key felt like prison,” recalled former Hopwood student Karen Amantillo, who was 14 when Yutu hit. “It made school feel more depressing. It was very unmotivating to do work.”

Kids would act-up and misbehave, Amantillo said, more than they had at the original Hopwood campus. “A few of our teachers were also having, like, borderline breakdowns,” she added, “because they’re so frustrated with us, too.”

Ambulances came several times, Attao recalled, to attend to students overcome by the sweltering conditions. She and other former students said sometimes they didn’t feel safe. In several instances people tore holes through the tarps outside of school hours, the former students said, to steal cash and iPad tablets.

It was neither a good place to teach, they said, nor to learn.

“Once Typhoon Yutu hit, I could tell that our curriculum kind of shifted down,” Attao said. “I felt like I’m learning more stuff I was learning in elementary rather than something I should be learning in middle school.”

The Breaking Point

Emma Chong remembers the moment she’d had enough.

It was a windy day at Tarpwood, with dust whipping across the tent village. When Chong got home after school she needed to use wet-naps to scrub off the thick film of dust and dirt caked onto her legs.

“It was ridiculous,” she recalled. “I was angry, but I was more frustrated because I knew there was no way for our situation to change, and I didn’t want to accept the situation for what it was.”

Chong channeled her despair into words, writing an article that she submitted to the Saipan Tribune. She chronicled the conditions at Tarpwood and called out school administrators, imploring them to do something.

“The insides of tents are impossible to clean, leaving us with an undesirable, dirty learning environment,” Chong wrote. “I believe the ‘campus’ is not suitable for teachers, students, and staff alike, whether in terms of physical, mental or emotional health.”

“We don’t want your empty words,” she added. “We want to see something done.” The article caused a stir across the small island community and thrust the eighth-grader into the spotlight.

Instead of seeing change, however, Chong and her Hopwood peers initially saw damage control. The day the Tribune story ran, Chong said, she was brought to meet with Ralph Torres, then the CNMI’s governor, at the Pacific Island Club resort, not far from the middle school campus.

Torres, she said, told her about plans to build a new temporary campus that would allow the students to leave Tarpwood — a plan still years away. He told her they would meet again, Chong said, but that never occurred. “He kind of ghosted us.” Torres did not respond to a request for comment from Civil Beat left by phone at his brothers’ law firm.

At school, Chong said her teachers told her Hopwood’s vice principal was upset with the story and had asked them to persuade Chong to rescind it.

“My teachers, very gratefully, they reminded her that I had my First Amendment right to free speech,” Chong recalled. “She was getting repercussions from, I guess, the main (Public School System), her bosses, basically because I made them look bad.”

Chong heard plenty of criticism from adults on the island, too, much of it in the form of comments posted on social media and responding to follow-up stories in the local media about the Tarpwood controversy. Chong, people wrote, was being overly dramatic and complaining too much.

Dumagan, who had weathered Yutu at his godsister’s apartment, watched the controversy unfold at his former school while he was studying at Marianas High.

“You know, on the islands we have this rather, like … code, I’d say, where you have to be grateful for what you get,” he said.

When Chong spoke out, “it was actually generally met with disdain from the elders of the community,” Dumagan recalled. “They’re saying that she was ungrateful for speaking out about inconsistencies of power with the electricity going out, with the heat (and) saying they weren’t necessarily learning anything.”

Chong tried her best not to mind all the criticism but that proved impossible in the end.

“I was just a kid who wrote this article — didn’t really think where it would go,” she said. “I just wanted people to know my opinion. There was a lot of positive feedback, but the good chunk of negative feedback, they kind of got to me and affected my mental standing after because suddenly I was a public figure for a little bit.”

By the time all the controversy had blown up, school administrations were already scrambling to move students from Tarpwood back to Hopwood. But how would they squeeze a student body of 1,000 kids into a fraction of the space they had before?

A Sort Of Homecoming

The first step, Magofna explained, was to trim that student body to about 600 kids and spread the rest around the island’s other four middle schools through rezoning.

Then, the Covid pandemic interrupted those plans. Students left Tarpwood in March 2020, Attao said, during her seventh-grade year. When they returned to the original and still mostly destroyed Hopwood campus in her eighth-grade year, she recalled, they were put back on half-day tracks to follow Covid protocols.

For about three school years after the pandemic, teachers, students and staff crowded into the four remaining usable buildings, with two classes sharing one classroom. Hopwood’s average class sizes doubled from between 15 and 17 kids, Principal Victorina Borja said, to between 30 and 35.

To try and make that work, the school employed a novel but challenging “team teaching” approach in which two teachers alternated as the lead instructor for the larger group.

Hopwood sixth-grade teacher Ma Jyn Binghit, for instance, led three of the day’s six class periods and her colleague handled the others. The approach took some getting used to, Binghit said — “we have different styles” — but she and her teaching partner made it work.

The approach allowed the teachers to learn from each other’s styles, Binghit said, but it also slowed the curriculum down because there were so many more kids in the room who needed to grasp the lessons before they could move on.

“You cannot leave the others behind,” she said. They’d also try to give the faster learners different activities to do, Binghit said, keeping them engaged while others in class caught up.

Prior to Yutu, Borja said, Hopwood had some of the highest learning outcomes among the middle schools across the CNMI. After the storm, he said it fell “closer to the middle of the pack.”

In March of this year — six years and five months after Yutu struck — nearly half of Hopwood’s remaining 600 or so students finally moved into modular classrooms set up next to the ruins of the destroyed tin-roof buildings.

“I think there was a lot of excitement when the students officially transferred to their new classrooms,” Borja told the Marianas Variety.

The school system used $4 million in Covid-era American Rescue Plan Act funds, Magofna said, to set up those modular rooms. Then, in May, the Variety reported that the same Korean firm, CJ Innovation, had contracted to rebuild Hopwood’s permanent campus, estimating it would take a year to complete.

The money had been waiting: FEMA had provided more than $22 million to rebuild Hopwood back in 2020. Overall, it gave $45 million to the CNMI school system for Yutu recovery projects.

The CJ Innovation completion estimate landed about a week after FEMA Region 9 Administrator Bob Fenton sent a letter to then-CNMI Governor Arnold Palacios informing him that nearly seven years after Yutu hit the Commonwealth had only spent $154 million of the more than $280 million FEMA had set aside for the storm’s recovery.

It was in that letter that Fenton issued a warning: If the Commonwealth didn’t spend its remaining $127 million by October 30, the islands would lose that money.

Fenton’s demand for more local action came after President Donald Trump, who’d recently been sworn into office, made clear he’d like to shut down FEMA entirely. So far, that move has been stymied in the courts.

Still, in just the first year of his second term, Trump has stunted the federal agency’s on-the-ground response to natural disasters around the country, including floods and tornadoes.

That’s largely left states and local governments to deal with the aftermath. Plus, there are growing concerns about whether FEMA is still equipped to deal with destructive storms and hurricanes comparable to Yutu.

It’s not clear whether Hopwood was among the incomplete projects flagged by Fenton. Verde, with FEMA, referred a request for the list of projects to the Commonwealth government because it develops the projects for FEMA to reimburse later.

Several days after Fenton’s letter dropped, CNMI Public Assistance Officer Patrick Guerrero had told the Variety he was confident the Commonwealth simply needed to show FEMA that it is “working towards completion” to hold on to those dollars.

Guerrero did not respond to multiple requests to discuss reasons for the Yutu projects’ delays.

A Ticking Clock

Initially, steep budget crunches in the Commonwealth the summer after Yutu helped stymie progress on Hopwood, according to former CNMI legislator Tina Sablan.

The school system, she said, needed to contribute several million dollars from its own budget before FEMA would provide the federal dollars set aside for Hopwood’s rebuild.

But the system could barely afford to pay its teachers, put gas in its school buses, or pay its utility bills, let alone devote millions of dollars to reconstruction.

That’s because the Commonwealth government that year faced its own severe budget shortfall, Sablan said, and it withheld more than $11 million from the school system — a nearly 40 percent cut.

The more than two years the Commonwealth’s board of education spent weighing whether to move the campus to a safer spot inland also contributed to the rebuilding delays. The school had survived on the coast for 63 years but growing climate change concerns led school leaders to look at other sites before they approved spending tens of millions of dollars to rebuild.

One of two alternative locations considered, Magofna said, was a sensitive bird habitat. Ultimately, the board decided to keep to the existing site.

Sablan recounted that during her time in office, and while working as a CNMI congressional aide, FEMA officials would occasionally tell her they were waiting on their counterparts in the Commonwealth government to file the proper paperwork before forging ahead with Hopwood and other rebuilding projects.

She didn’t know what the local holdup was. Maybe part of the challenge, she said, was not having enough trained and experienced personnel to meet all the federal requirements in a timely manner.

Déjà Vu

Many former Hopwood students later went on to study at Northern Marianas College. The school mainly functions as a community college but offers several four-year bachelor’s degree programs.

Attao is pursuing an associate’s degree in natural resource management there, she said, with the goal of a career in medicine or ecology.

As she advanced through high school and approached college, Attao realized she was behind, largely because of the learning lag she experienced at Hopwood. She’s relied on the online tutoring service Khan Academy, and the flashcard phone app Quizlet, to help her catch up.

“I’m a Pacific Islander. I don’t really want to fall behind, and I don’t want to make my family name fall behind,” she explained. “So even though we didn’t learn most of these things back in middle school or even my time going into high school, I try and learn it outside or even while I’m taking classes at community college.”

Northern Marianas was severely damaged by Yutu, and Soudelor before it. For the Hopwood students, that meant one thing was immediately familiar: Many classes and lectures take place in the same kind of canvas tents erected at Tarpwood.

In college, they have only had to spend about an hour or two at a time in the tents, said Amantillo, who graduated from Northern Marianas this past summer.

But “when I first started in college here,” she said, “I was getting flashbacks from middle school.”

This story is part of The 89 Percent Project, an initiative of the global journalism collaboration Covering Climate Now.