A Teenager Built Her Own Hurricane Safety Program After Her School Skipped It

Elise Raurell grew up in South Florida, where hurricanes are a fact of the calendar, and noticed something missing from her public school education: nobody taught students what to actually do when one arrived. “Growing up in South Florida, going to public school, I realized that we weren’t really learning anything about hurricane preparation safety, even though it’s super important,” she said.

She knew the stakes from memory. As a child she had lived through Hurricane Irma. “I was scared about the destruction on my street, and the trees that had fallen down,” she said. So in 2025, she built the lesson her school never offered and made it her Girl Scout Gold Award project. She called it Storm Smart.

Storm Smart is a set of short, classroom-ready modules, three of them: one on assembling an emergency kit, one on preparing a home and staying safe as a storm hits, and one on getting through the hours during and after. Raurell built it to spread on its own. A student who sits through the modules is equipped to run them for the next classroom, so the program moves the way a good rumor does, one student handing it to the next.

That is roughly how it has reached nearly 500 students, many of them taught by classmates rather than by Raurell herself. “One of the most rewarding parts of this program is seeing students learn the material and then go on to teach their peers about it, and through that learn leadership and teaching skills,” she said.

No school district has adopted Storm Smart as required coursework. It travels instead through the program’s website, its social accounts, and teachers who choose to bring it in. For a subject that can save a life in a bad storm, built by a student and carried by students, that is further than the official curriculum ever took it.. For a subject that can save a life in a bad storm, built by a student and carried by students, that is further than the official curriculum ever took it.