Generation180’s issue brief reveals that America’s schools are at the heart of our nation’s disaster response system — and dangerously underprepared. More than half of FEMA’s designated disaster shelters are K-12 schools, yet less than 0.1% of K-12 schools nationwide have onsite battery energy storage systems to keep critical systems, such as lighting, HVAC, refrigeration, and medical equipment, running during outages. With natural disasters more than tripling since 1990 and millions of students already living in disaster-prone counties, the gap between the role schools play and the resources they have is putting communities at risk.