Crisis Communication and Organisational Continuity in a Post‐Disaster Emergency School in Indonesia

ABSTRACT Disasters disrupt public organisations not only by destroying their premises but also by dismantling the routines through which coordination and service delivery are sustained. This study examines how a public primary school in North Sumatra, Indonesia, continued to function for about two and a half months after the November 2025 flash floods associated with Cyclone Senyar, once its buildings, media, and administrative routines were unusable. A qualitative single‐case study drew on field observation and in‐depth interviews with classroom teachers and student volunteers. The findings show that communication came to perform functions that infrastructure and administration would ordinarily perform. Instruction was reduced to simplified, repetition‐based, oral‐centred delivery, with repetition also substituting for the printed materials that normally hold curricular knowledge between sessions. Where organisationally owned media had been destroyed, limited digital access was reconstituted through household devices with parental mediation, relocating provision from the institution to the family. Informal communication coordinated attendance, roles, and daily operations without administrative structure, while the continued presence of staff signalled that the organisation had not ceased to function. Two boundary conditions qualify this adaptation: assessment requirements remained fixed while operating practice was forced to change, and families sustained participation on the basis of institutional certainty about reconstruction rather than the quality of everyday communication. The study relocates crisis communication analysis from public messaging to the internal practices through which an organisation reproduces itself under prolonged emergency conditions, and shows that such reproduction has a horizon set outside the organisation. Implications are drawn for contingency planning in temporary service settings.