Resilience of School Systems Following Severe Earthquakes.

Natural disasters may have catastrophic and long‐lasting impacts on communities' physical, economic, and social infrastructure. Slow recovery of educational services following such events is likely to cause traumatic stress in children, lead families to out‐migrate, and affect the community's overall social stability. Methods for quantifying and assessing the restoration process of educational systems and their dependencies on other supporting infrastructure have not received adequate attention. This study introduces, for the first time, a new framework to evaluate the functionality, recovery, and resilience of a school system following severe earthquake events. The framework considers both the quantity and quality of education services provided, school enrollment, and staff employment, as well as the interaction between various agents such as staff, students, parents, administration, and community. A virtual testbed community, Centerville, is utilized to highlight the application of this framework. The impact of school reopening policies on the number of students enrolled as well as the potential for homeschooling is also considered. The availability of various enrollment alternatives for students, backup classroom space and functioning utility systems, and facilitation of staff and supplies transfer between schools substantially increase the resilience of the education service. Plain Language Summary: Recovery of educational services following natural disasters is key for ensuring the well‐being of communities and for maintaining the overall social stability. Currently, there is a lack of quantifiable methodologies for assessing the restoration process of educational systems while accounting for their dependencies on other supporting infrastructure and the society. In this study, a new sociotechnical approach is devised for evaluating functionality, recovery, and resilience of a school system following severe earthquake events. The framework is applied to a virtual testbed to highlight its application. Various social and physical parameters are shown to have a substantial impact on the recovery trajectory and the overall resilience of the schools. Key Points: A new framework is devised to estimate the resilience and functionality of K‐12 schools after earthquakesThe framework considers the role played by the society on maintaining the schools' functionalityA Markov chain stochastic model, coupled with dynamic optimization, is used to model the near‐optimal school recovery trajectory of the schools [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]