Fellow teachers and parents react to the tragic loss of a dedicated, compassionate math teacher, one of many still missing in western North Carolina one month after Hurricane Helene
By Billy Liggett | billy@rantnc.com
Brianna Rivera’s first impression of her seventh grade math teacher was that of an “outgoing, intelligent — even a little quirky — teacher.” Kim Ashby had a passion for math and taught with a smile. Every day as her students left for their next class, she sang Bobby McFerrin’s “Don’t Worry, Be Happy.”
Brianna would soon learn there was more to Mrs. Ashby. In her, she found a teacher who wanted her students to come away with more than math skills. She found a teacher who sought connections with every student — who cared about their well-being as much as their report cards.
“In Mrs. Ashby, I knew I had someone I could talk to. She always knew what to say,” says Brianna, now a student at Southern Lee High School. “When I was stressed about cheerleading or school, she would tell me to slow down and take one step at a time. When it was hard to not get pulled into the wrong things by my friends, she would say it was OK for me to keep my distance sometimes. When I was angry or frustrated, her words helped me stay calm and focused.
“She believed in the students who didn’t believe in themselves. Her encouragement has helped me become a better person.”
Brianna wrote about her teacher and the enormous impact she had on her life for an AVID essay in February of 2023. Her mother, Christian Rivera, reshared that essay on her Facebook page on Sept. 30, 2024, three days after the heavy rains and torrential flooding from Hurricane Helene swept away Ashby and her husband’s mountain home in Banner Elk, North Carolina.
Kim Ashby is one of more than 25 people still missing from the storm that killed nearly 100 North Carolinians and displaced tens of thousands more. Her story has become a symbol of the destruction and heartache caused by one of the deadliest storms in U.S. history.
And her loss has been devastating to the staff and students at SanLee Middle School, where she taught since 2019, and to a Sanford community that became her home over the past five years.
MRS. ASHBY
When Christian Chaney was named principal at SanLee Middle School in July after serving as assistant principal and principal at Greenwood Elementary, he sent out a mass email to his new school’s staff asking if anybody wanted a 30-minute “get to know the new guy” meeting in his office before the start of the school year.
His first response was from Kim Ashby.
Ashby was entering her fifth year teaching seventh-grade math at the school, and along the way she took on other roles like coach of the chess team. Chaney remembers their talk well — a native of Boone, he found a common interest with Ashby almost immediately — their love of the mountains in North Carolina.
“It’s both happy and heartbreaking to think back on it, because our connection was the mountains,” Chaney recalls. “I went to Appalachian State, and she had family who went there as well. And all she wanted to talk about was that mountain house they had just finished. The trips she and her husband were planning. Being active and being outdoors. The beauty of western North Carolina. She joked to me, ‘We’ll be spending a lot of time out there, but I won’t be out too much.’ It’s bittersweet to remember that talk, because, man, it was all such a special thing to her, and she lit up when she talked about it. Knowing what happened, there’s a sadness now.”
Dr. Natalie Kelly preceded Chaney as SanLee Middle School principal before taking on a new role as assistant superintendent of curriculum and instruction at Lee County Schools this summer. She says Ashby had a gift of connecting with middle school students — not easy to do with pre-teens and teens at perhaps the most vulnerable (and awkward) time in adolescence.
“I remember one morning, she was standing outside of her classroom before class and she saw an eighth-grade student walking down the seventh-grade hall,” Kelly says. “And, of course, the way the school is structured and organized, we want everybody in their right hall. Now maybe any other teacher might have given a quick, ‘Get in your hall’ and not think twice about it, Mrs. Ashby smiled at the student and said, ‘Although I love starting my day seeing your face — and although I’m excited that I got to see you this morning — let me escort you to the correct hall.
“That just described her. That’s how she does it. She always tried to love every child like they were her own children, and she tried to talk to them and treat them the way she wanted to be talked to and treated. She was an encourager, more than anything.”
Ashby would even encourage Kelly, whether it was a quick word in the hallway or short emails to tell Kelly she was doing a great job leading the school.
“I told her daughter [Jessica Meidinger] last week, that’s just who she was,” she adds. “She wanted to make an impact, and where else but middle school — at such a pivotal age for a student who’s trying to find themselves — can you make this kind of impact? She cared about the child first and the academics second.”
Rebecca Lynn Johnson had a son in Ashby’s class this year and said she’d go out of her way to make her son — who has ADHD and suffers from anxiety — feel understood.
“My son could often be seen as ‘difficult,’ but Mrs. Ashby never saw him that way,” Johnson says. “She saw him as someone special who has a lot to offer the world, and she wanted to do everything she could to nurture that and make him believe it, too.”
Johnson says a week or so before the storm, she received a message from Ashby about two of her son’s missing assignments. She learned he had been going through “some really challenging stuff” at home, Johnson says, so Ashby told her she was going to let it slide and work with him to make up the assignments.
“She let me know she was thinking of us and praying for us,” she says, “and to let her know if we needed anything. I just thought that was so sweet.”
In her AVID essay, Brianna Rivera noted that the percentage of Latina women with a doctorate degree is low (less than 1 percent according to one recent study). She wrote that the low number will not be the reason she fails, but the reason she succeeds. And she attributed that mindset to her relationship with Mrs. Ashby.
“She helped me see past the surface,” she wrote. “That I will succeed because of who I am [and not because of] perceptions, titles or cliques. “Mrs. Ashby taught me that if we just stop and have a conversation with someone, we’ll learn we are more alike than we think. When we stop and talk, fewer kids are eating lunch by themselves at school. When we don’t stop and talk, our perceptions divide us.”
“She helped Brianna get through a tough seventh-grade year,” says Brianna’s mother, Christian Rivera. “She was more than a teacher to her. She was easy to talk to and was a great support to my daughter. I was happy to know that Brianna had someone like Mrs. Ashby who cared about her beyond the classroom.”
SWEPT AWAY
Kim and Rod Ashby’s cabin overlooking the Elk River was their dream vacation home. Two two spent the last several years constructing the home and finally hosted a large family gathering there this past summer.
The home sat above the perceived floodplain, Kim’s daughter Jessica Meidinger told The Washington Post in October, and with heavy rains forecast on Sept. 26, the couple decided to drive from Sanford to make sure the gates of their ground-floor garage were raised and the cabin was secure.
When the family didn’t hear from Rod and Kim the following day, many thought the lack of cell service and communication after the storm simply kept them from reaching out. According to the Post, Kim’s sister received a Facebook message from one of their neighbors in Elk Park saying they saw Rod running along the opposite riverbank — he yelled to the neighbors that he was OK, but Kim was missing.
Minutes earlier, the Asbys were packing their things and preparing to evacuate the home after water from the nearby river began to spill over the banks. According to the family, debris hit the pillars that supported the house, and before the couple could escape through the window, their house slid into the river, “spinning wildly with the floodwaters.”
Rod and Kim and their three dogs held each other on a mattress in the home as water came up around them. According to the Post, “they were searching for a spot where they could pull themselves to safety when they were struck by a tree. Kim fell from Rod’s arms, and the last he saw of her, she was being carried away in the torrent.”
Rod hiked barefoot nearly 10 miles to another home before he was found. His survival held out hope that Kim would also be found soon. Thus began the family’s frantic search in an area pummeled by flood waters, debris and downed trees.
As of Oct. 28, Kim Ashby has not been found — only “mud-caked purse, her wallet and driver’s license still inside.”
The story made national headlines and became a symbol of the destruction and loss in western North Carolina caused by Hurricane Helene. Ashby is one of more than 25 in the state still missing as of Oct. 28, while nearly 100 deaths have been confirmed. In all, Hurricane Helene caused nearly $53.6 billion in damage in North Carolina, three times the amount from Hurricane Florence in 2018.
A month since Ashby’s disappearance, the stories from USA Today, CBS News, CNN and other major outlets are fewer, but Meidinger and family continue to post daily updates on the search on Facebook and other social media platforms.
On Oct. 27, Meidinger wrote: “Mom is still missing. … We finished digging out the large area that had around six to eight feet of sediment as well as fully breaking apart the 300-meter long debris pile. Today focused on the stretch between Poga Road and Lake Watauga along the Elk River. There are still many debris piles, and the teams — along with the same handler and dog we’ve been using all week — worked through these the best they could. Unfortunately, we’re running out of plausible areas to search that we haven’t already searched in depth. We’re not done yet, but we know our odds are not high for ever finding her. That reality is very difficult to swallow, but it is a reality we must face.”
COMMUNITY MOURNS
Chaney first learned of Ashby’s disappearance that Saturday, and much of the SanLee community learned the news before it was made “public” on social media that Sunday afternoon. Before school resumed that Monday, Chaney sent an email to SanLee parents asking them to join him in prayer for her and her family and to recognize that their children may have questions or concerns. The school had counselors, social workers and a mental health team at the ready that Monday to support both students and the staff who grew close to Ashby over the past five years.
There was always hope in the first week that Ashby would be found. But with each passing day, that likelihood grew smaller, and eventually, Chaney and his staff focused on honoring a beloved teacher and keeping her legacy alive.
“Our students had a lot of questions, but with the resources we had ready for them, I think we were able to answer those questions and offer support,” Chaney says. “For the teachers, it’s been difficult. They have come in and done what’s best for the kids, which I think speaks volumes to the environment here, but they’ve had to be resilient. They lost a friend.”
Rod Ashby and Jessica Meidinger visited SanLee Middle School in October to meet with Chaney and talk to the staff. They were presented with the first Ashby Award, which moving forward will be the monthly honor (formerly known as the Stellar Stallion Award) given to staff members who go above and beyond. Plans are also being discussed to dedicate an “outdoor chess area” to honor Ashby and her dedication to the school’s chess club.
“I don’t think Mrs. Ashby would have approved of us making such a big deal about her, because she never wanted any of the spotlight,” says Kelly. “She would say, ‘We are here for the children,’ and she would have told us, ‘Get back in that classroom and teach those children.’
“I think the best way to honor her is to make sure these children continue to learn and get the best math experience possible. We have to provide that. She would be disappointed in us if we did anything else. If SanLee failed, that would not be acceptable to her. So I think we just need to live out her expectations — what she set for herself and what she would have us set for ourselves.”
As for the students, Rebecca Lynn Johnson says it’s been difficult for her son to process what happened and that he will likely never see Mrs. Ashby again.
“There are a lot of us who are just beginning to grieve, while others are holding out hope that she’s still out there, somewhere,” she says. “It’s really hard to just give up hope when she hasn’t been found. That solid proof, that closure, isn’t there yet for her family, her friends or her students, and that’s what makes this so hard. So you don’t really know what to tell your kids.
“I think my son, in the back of his mind, knows she probably isn’t coming back, but his heart won’t let go yet. He still prays for her and hopes she’ll return, and it just breaks your heart, as a parent, to see the impact this has had on your child. My heart hurts for all of her students trying to process all of this.
“We’ve been devastated over all of this and cannot imagine what her family must be going through. Our thoughts and prayers are with them daily. She was such a beautiful person all around.”
A GoFundMe account has been created to help Rod and Kim Ashby and their family. As of Oct. 28, just over $60,000 has been raised, with a $100,000 goal.