Forty-Three Columns and One Question She Won't Answer

Val Okafor-Peña is not a real person. She is a fictional character drawn from documented patterns in how South Florida teenagers are navigating the college application process in 2026. Her spreadsheet, however, is entirely plausible, and several versions of it almost certainly exist on laptops across Miami-Dade County right now.

The laptop is open on the kitchen counter between a fruit bowl and a stack of mail that includes, visibly, an envelope from Citizens Property Insurance. Val Okafor-Peña, seventeen, senior at a STEM magnet in Miami-Dade, applying to twelve schools that were once twenty-three, has agreed to walk us through her college list. Her dad's landscaping truck idles in the driveway. The AC is working hard. She pulls up a spreadsheet with the confidence of someone who has explained this before and found the experience mildly tedious.

You have a spreadsheet.

Val: Everyone has a spreadsheet. Mine just has more columns.

How many columns?

Val: Forty-three. Some of them are normal. Acceptance rate, average aid package, whether they have my major. And then I have a section my guidance counselor called "unusual," which. I mean. She was being nice about it.

What's in the unusual section?

Val: OK so. Flood zone status, which is literally a public lookup, it takes thirty seconds.¹ Grid reliability, which I mostly just looked at whether the state has had major outage events in the last five years and whether they're on an isolated grid. And then water source. Where does the campus water come from, is it a stressed system, are there restrictions. That's basically it. It's like six columns out of forty-three and people act like I'm building a bunker.

Walk me through one. A school you eliminated.

Val: OK, so I really liked this school in Houston. Great data science program, good aid, the campus looked beautiful. And then I ran the ZIP code through the FEMA flood map and it's in a moderate-to-high risk zone. And I was like, OK, but maybe it's fine? So I looked at what happened during Harvey and during the 2024 floods, and that area got hit. Buildings flooded, campus closed for weeks.² Then I looked at the grid, and Texas is on ERCOT, which is their own separate thing, and it failed in 2021, and they've made improvements but it's still isolated. If something goes wrong, they can't pull power from neighboring states the way the Eastern grid can.³

And I'm sitting there thinking: I'm going to pay tuition to be somewhere where the campus might flood and the power might go out for a week during finals? Why would I do that? My mom was like, "it's a great school," and I was like, yeah, it's a great school in a flood zone on an isolated power grid. Pick one problem. They have two.

Where does the water thing come from?

Val: [pauses, like the question is slightly strange] I live here. You know where our water comes from? The Biscayne Aquifer, which is basically a limestone sponge sitting right under us, and the ocean is pushing into it.⁴ We had water restrictions in February. That's not even dry season. Well, it is dry season, but it was early.⁵ My dad does landscaping, so he tracks that stuff because it affects his irrigation schedules, and he was saying this year was bad. Noticeably bad.

So when I'm looking at a school in Tucson, and I find out their water comes from the Colorado River, which is at like twenty-something percent capacity⁶...

Do your friends do any of this?

Val: No. My friend Daniela is applying to schools based on which ones have the best sororities. Which, fine. That's her criteria. Mine are different.

Does it come up?

Val: Sometimes. I told my friend Marco I crossed off a school because it was in a flood zone and he literally said, "Val, we live in a flood zone." And I was like: yeah. Exactly. That's my point. He didn't get it. Or he got it and didn't want to get it. I don't know.

Do you think of yourself as someone who cares about climate change?

Val: I mean, sure, in the way everyone does? I'm not in any clubs about it. I don't go to marches. I just check the flood map. It's public information. I don't know why that's a personality trait.

Your parents. What do they think of your process?

Val: My mom thinks I'm being "extra," which is her word for when I do something she doesn't understand but can't argue with. She handles our insurance, so she knows what the renewal was this year. I think it was like eleven thousand? For a house that's never flooded.⁷ She doesn't love that number. But she also doesn't connect that to what I'm doing with the spreadsheet. Or maybe she does and doesn't want to say it.

My dad gets it more, I think. He doesn't say much about it, but last week he looked over my shoulder at the list and just said, "Good schools." And I could tell he'd actually read the locations. He didn't say anything about the ones that were missing.

You've narrowed it to twelve. Are you happy with the list?

Val: [long pause] Happy is a strong word. I think it's a realistic list. The schools that are left are in places where the infrastructure works. Where I can focus on school and not on logistics. I keep calling it logistics. My English teacher would probably say I'm avoiding something.

And then you come back here for breaks.

Val: [opens her mouth, closes it, looks at the Citizens envelope on the counter]

Yeah. I come back here.

Does that —

Val: Next question.

That's all my questions.

Val: Oh. OK. [closes the laptop halfway, then opens it again] Sorry, I just. It's a spreadsheet. People keep acting like it means something. It's just how I'm picking a school.

She walks us to the door. Outside, the afternoon light has that specific Miami quality, bright but heavy, the air thick enough to lean against. Her dad's truck is gone. The sprinklers across the street come on, which seems optimistic for 4 PM in May. Val watches them for a second, the way you watch something you've seen a thousand times and might be seeing differently now, then goes back inside.

Footnotes

1. FEMA flood maps are publicly searchable by address at msc.fema.gov. A Pew study found 6,444 schools serving nearly 4 million students in the 100 U.S. counties with the highest flood risk. https://healthyschools.org/2025/06/24/managing-flood-risks-for-safer-schools ↩

2. Over nine million U.S. students were affected by school closures or cancellations due to extreme weather in the 2024–25 school year. https://brookings.edu/articles/climate-change-is-an-urgent-but-often-overlooked-education-policy-issue ↩

3. Texas operates on the ERCOT grid, which is largely isolated from the two major U.S. interconnections, limiting its ability to import power during emergencies. https://ornl.gov/publication/hydroclimate-coupled-framework ↩

4. The Biscayne Aquifer, Miami-Dade County's primary drinking water source, is experiencing accelerating saltwater intrusion due to sea-level rise and its porous limestone geology. https://cbsnews.com/miami/news/south-floridas-water-supply-under-threat-from-saltwater-intrusion-crisis ↩

5. Miami-Dade County imposed water use restrictions in February 2026, which experts described as "symptoms of a vulnerability set in motion long before the drought developed." https://theinvadingsea.com/2026/05/07/drought-florida-everglades-restoration-miami-dade-biscayne-aquifer-water-wildfire-resilience ↩

6. Lake Powell was at 24% capacity, with annual Colorado River use exceeding inflows by 3.6 million acre-feet as of late 2025. ↩

7. Miami-Dade homeowners saw insurance premiums increase by 322% in 2024. The average Florida homeowner's premium in 2026 is between $5,800 and $7,200 annually, roughly three to four times the national average. https://gracerealty.us/insurance-crisis-2026 ↩