Schools should only be closed when absolutely necessary.

You never know when there will be a natural disaster.

Journalist Matthew Yglesias shared an article yesterday about how school closures from natural disasters are now compounding the harms of pandemic school closures.

Natural disasters across the country have disrupted school calendars — and, of course, when the power is out, even suboptimal virtual instruction is impossible.

But for many students, this school year is far from stable. In California, schools in the path of fires closed for days, or smoke made the air quality so poor schools not damaged by flames had to be shuttered, too. Floods ate into instruction in Georgia, Tennessee and Virginia this year, to name a few. It was too hot to hold classes in parts of Virginia, Baltimore and Philadelphia at different points over the last several months. And at the start of the current school year, catastrophic flooding in eastern Kentucky took lives and school days, and state lawmakers said districts need to make up only 15 of the missed class days.

This suggests, first, that we should take climate change seriously and make sure our school buildings — and education systems — are resilient in an…