Hurricane Katrina Recovery: Year Two

Donations help, but many Gulf Coast schools are still struggling two years after the devastating storm.

by Diane Loupe

01/22/2014

After canceling all fundraisers in the wake of Hurricane Katrina, North Bay Elementary School in Biloxi, Miss., resumed a wrapping paper sale last fall and discovered an unexpected market.

Katrina had soaked and leveled homes, displacing about 100 families and destroying everything inside—everything, including wrapping paper.

“Nobody had bought any the year before, and everybody needed wrapping paper this year,” explains North Bay PTO President Gina Tompkins. The $13,000 in profit will go toward new computer equipment for the elementary school’s 700-plus students, about 10 percent fewer than pre-storm enrollment.

Although fundraisers, fall carnivals, gift exchanges, and school workdays resumed this year in many Louisiana and Mississippi schools damaged or destroyed by the August 2005 storm, others are still making do in temporary buildings. Parent volunteers are living in FEMA trailers where once there were beautiful homes. Creating parent involvement continues to be a challenge as many families along the Gulf Coast are spending every spare moment trying to rebuild those homes.

“The hardest thing right now is to ask anybody to buy something for a fundraiser because every dollar counts to help them get their lives back to normal,” says Melissa Jones, president of the Bay-Waveland Middle School PTSA in Bay St. Louis, Miss. For that reason, parent leaders focused on service projects, such as planting flowers and picking up trash, rather than fundraisers.

To attract volunteers to the Saucier Elementary Fall Festival, the Mississippi school’s PTO gave a percentage of the profits to teachers who worked on the event. They could use the money for their classrooms. Twenty-four teachers, nearly half the staff, helped out. “It has been hard to get volunteers because so many go out of town to work,” says Saucier PTO Treasurer Sally Gill.

Following the hurricane, about 90 percent of Saucier families were living in tents without basics like blankets and coats. Emily Brittain Elementary in Butler, Pa., undertook a campaign to collect these needed items, ultimately sending nearly 11 tons of donated clothing, bedding, equipment, and other supplies. The Emily Brittain PTO received PTO Today’s 2006 Parent Group of the Year award in the Outstanding Service Project category, and Saucier Elementary redistributed extra items to schools that needed them in a neighboring county.

Enrollment now is higher than before the storm, and Gill says the PTO is working to get additional playground equipment. The school raised $2,000 through a Santa’s workshop, where students could purchase small gifts for less than $5.

Many other Gulf Coast school fundraisers are supporting students. In Ocean Springs, Miss., St. Alphonsus Catholic School raised $35,000 with a draw-down raffle. “We’re still helping families with tuition and scholarship help,” says Principal Miriam Jones. Donations of equipment and federal grants helped, and the PTO doubled teacher stipends to $100 and paid for teacher Christmas bonuses.

The Central Elementary PTO in Pascagoula, Miss., budgeted most of its money toward purchasing uniforms for students who couldn’t afford them, Principal Stephanie Yeager says. About 250 students were displaced by Katrina, living in tents, trailers, and cruise ships, plus Central absorbed an additional 150 students from a nearby school.

Windows are still boarded up, Yeager says, but temporary doors have replaced curtains in doorways. Still, new needs pop up every day. The power cords on computers that survived the storm are starting to fail, and teachers lost all their seasonal decorations. “The storm was an equalizer; it didn’t matter if you had a million-dollar home on the beach or a Section 8 house miles away from the beach,” she says.

In New Orleans and surrounding areas, many parents are waiting for some schools to reopen, while other schools serve children whose parents haven’t returned to the city yet. The state PTA wanted to recruit a single affiliated parent group in New Orleans, which had 23 before the storm, says Louisiana PTA President Cheryl Joslyn. That’s not an easy task; public school administration has splintered among the Orleans Parish School Board, the state, a pre-Katrina entity for underperforming schools called the Recovery School District, and several dozen charter school boards.

So far, there is only one PTA in the city, although many schools have independent parent groups. Hynes Elementary in the Lakeview area, which experienced some of New Orleans’ worst flooding, stands vacant, surrounded by gutted homes, boarded windows, and rusted fencing and playground equipment. Parents from the school obtained charter status to spur its reopening, says PTO President Timmy Vernier.

Students now attend classes at one of two campuses in other parts of the city. Whenever it’s Vernier’s turn to bring snacks for her child’s kindergarten class, she brings a gallon of water, too, because the school building doesn’t have enough fountains. “We had some money to buy a water fountain, but we decided to save money rather than spending it on a school that is not going to be ours in the long run,” she says.

Recovery for Hynes Elementary parents has been especially rocky. After the storm, PTO leaders discovered that their former treasurer apparently took most of the group’s pre-Katrina account of $85,000. The previous president, Cyndi Cramer, withdrew her child from the school after facing accusations that she was involved in the missing money. “It was taking a toll on my family life,” Cramer says. “I wasn’t sleeping at night.”

Then, in February, a parent group meeting was canceled after a tornado swept through, killing one woman, injuring dozens, and damaging hundreds of homes, many of which hadn’t yet been completely repaired from Katrina.

“What’s next?” Vernier asks. “Locusts?”

Recovery has been somewhat easier for a few other schools. At Benjamin Franklin Elementary, the first public school to reopen in New Orleans, the PTO spent its time and energy this year preparing for a workday to build a playground. Kaboom, a national nonprofit organization, recruited 472 volunteers from around the country to build the 5,000-square-foot playground.

When the volunteers arrived in February, they were greeted with a New Orleans-style feast: king cakes, jambalaya, crayfish pasta, bread pudding, and a jazz band. “We had more food than they could handle,” remembers PTO President Wanda T. Williams. The parent group is now working on equipping the school’s science labs.

Central Elementary in Pascagoula, Miss., also got a new Kaboom playground. And about 30 miles from New Orleans, Abney Elementary in Slidell, La., is planning for its own playground workday courtesy of that organization, which frees up the group’s money for other needs, says PTA President Paska Lipham. The storm passed directly over Abney, tearing up trees, ripping out fences, and filling the school with 4 feet of water, effectively destroying everything in the building down to its floors.

The PTA collected $13,000 selling chocolate and other items from a catalog and about $2,000 from a two-mile fun run in the fall. Younger grades had a Mardi Gras parade in February, decorating banana boxes and wearing them around their shoulders as floats.

Enrollment at the school northeast of Lake Pontchartrain—about 1,000 students before the storm—hovers around 800 now, and the school has a few computers and is working on getting more. “Everything seems to be back to normal, or the new normal,” Lipham says.

The consequences of the storm weren’t felt just in Mississippi and Louisiana; school districts as far away as California and New York, and as close as Texas, enrolled displaced students.

In Dallas, nearly all of the 22 evacuee students taken in by St. Rita Catholic School have returned home, leaving a changed community, says Susan Wynne, president of the St. Rita Parents’ Club. The school filmed some of the evacuee families about how they were affected, and the result is a gripping and emotional video. The post-hurricane experience has spurred more church volunteers to work with St. Mary of Carmel, a disadvantaged sister parish in Dallas primarily composed of Hispanic Catholics.

“Instead of doing fundraisers for them, we’re trying to do work in tandem and mentor them in ways they can do things,” Wynne says. “If you bring somebody money, that’s only going to last so long. But if you mentor their families and their parent association and show them ways to get more parents involved, show them ways they can fundraise, that will build the strength of their community.”

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