DocServer/KatrinaReport.pdf?docID=1421For Immediate Release 
April 4, 2006

Children's Defense Fund Calls Unmet Mental Health, Health and Education Needs of Katrina's Children a Moral Scandal and Crisis

Contact:  David Ruffin, (202) 662-3613, druffin@childrensdefense.org, or
Jodi Reid, (202) 662-3602, jreid@childrensdefense.org

BATON ROUGE -- A Children’s Defense Fund (CDF) Report, Katrina’s Children: A Call to Conscience and Action, urges immediate mental health and health services to children struggling to cope with Katrina’s trauma. Action recommendations include an Emergency Children’s Health and Mental Health Corps, Mobile Health Vans, School-based Health Clinics, and Emergency Medicaid Relief to cut through 50 different state requirements and bureaucratic barriers.

“That Katrina’s children’s most basic human needs have been neglected is a moral scandal and impending long term disaster. Over seven long months after children in our nation’s poorest states suffered horrifying flood devastation, tens of thousands of them have been left to wrestle with their profound losses without adequate mental health and health supports. Seven months is a lifetime for a child. Seven months is an unending nightmare for children denied help to clear their psyches battered by loss of family members, friends, homes, schools, and neighborhoods,” CDF President Marian Wright Edelman said.

In addition to emergency mental health and health assistance, CDF calls for immediate attention to the public education, after school, summer tutorials and educational enrichment needs of Katrina survivor children. Thousands of school age children are out of school in New Orleans and elsewhere in makeshift trailer “villages” and depression-like tent camps. They need immediate education opportunities to make up for lost time and long term education disadvantages. CDF has opened Emergency After School CDF Freedom Schools™ in Mississippi and plans similar efforts with local Historically Black Colleges and Universities and organizations in Louisiana before the long hot summer begins.

“Our efforts are a drop in the basket of need. Our invisible children need to be on the front burner of adult and national concern and action. This is not a time for business as usual, compassion fatigue, moving on to the next story, partisan political games, or citizen apathy. This is a time for our nation to act with urgency and efficiency to construct strong mental health, health, education, and after school levees for all Katrina’s children without another moment’s delay,” Mrs. Edelman says.

CDF’s report states that immediately after the 9/11 terrorist attacks, the world and nation rallied to assist victims with emergency mental health teams and prompt governmental action, cutting through bureaucratic barriers to ensure immediate health and mental health coverage. Yet over sevenmonths after Katrina, not only have our leaders in the White House and Congress and state houses and legislatures not responded with the same urgency, compassion and efficiency to help Katrina survivor children and families, many threw up barrier after barrier and are still dragging their feet.

While acknowledging how many people reached out to Katrina survivors during and in the storm’s immediate aftermath, the Report states that huge challenges remain to ensure that children and families who have lost so much family members, homes, schools, jobs, friends, caregivers, doctors, dentists, professional careers, the records of their lives are able to stitch these pieces back together and build a better future for their children and themselves. They need all our help now on an urgent and sustained basis.

The report cites Dr. Bruce D. Perry of The Child Trauma Academy in Houston, Texas who warns that “The real crisis from Katrina is coming. It is more relentless and more powerful than the floodwaters in New Orleans; more destructive than the 150 mile an hour winds of Katrina. Over our lifetime, this crisis will cost our society billions upon billions of dollars. Yet our society may not have the wisdom to see that the real crisis of Katrina is the hundreds of thousands of ravaged, displaced and traumatized children and may not have the will to prevent the crisis.”

The report says all of us have a self interest in ensuring safe physical levees, sound preventive and disaster emergency procedures and systems, and competent caring personnel before the next disaster, which could affect any, many or all of us, strikes. And all of us have a self interest in building the strong health, mental health, preschool, educational and economic levees to ensure that no child is left behind or adrift at sea because of poverty and neglect in the richest nation on earth.

"Tell Them We Need Hope"

At a meeting in Houston with survivor children from New Orleans at New Orleans West, a school operated by the KIPP Academy, the children, whose wounds, words, drawings and dreams are shared in the report, were asked what one or two things they wanted to tell America’s people and leaders about their needs. One young boy responded quickly: “Tell them we need hope.”

Every adult in every sector and all our political leaders need to step up to the plate this very minute to give him and the hundreds of thousands of Katrina children and families hope and help. We must make sure our nation their nation does not forget them, ignore them, neglect them, and continue to leave them behind, invisible and uncared for, like the debris still littering New Orleans’ Ward 9 and other devastated Gulf Coast communities.

“All children need to be able to believe in a better future, in themselves, and in our country’s professed values and promises. Children need to believe that adults entrusted with their care will protect rather than neglect and mistreat them at home, in school, in our social services systems and in our public policy and budget choices,” CDF states.

(1) Provide immediate emergency mental health and health services to children and their families struggling to cope with the trauma of Katrina including: an Emergency Children’s Health and Mental Health Corps; School-based Health Clinics with easy access for children; Mobile Health Vans with trained personnel every day of the week to help traumatized children and families; Emergency Medicaid for 24 months, including the full federal funding proposed in the bipartisan Grassley-Baucus Bill; Increasing Community Outreach and Rebuilding Community Health Centers and Hospitals which serve the poor in areas where the health infrastructure and personnel have been decimated.

(2) Ensure every child in Katrina affected states a quality public education and after school and summer educational supports to help them make up for lost time and overcome previous and continuing school disparities.

(3) Join CDF’s campaign to ensure every Katrina evacuee child and every uninsured child in the United States from birth to adulthood comprehensive health and mental health coverage now with a national benefit floor with full federal funding.

(4) Join Katrina Child Watch™ visits to let these children and families know that we care and have not forgotten them, and to let our leaders know that we will not cease until they act.

(5) Demand that our leaders at all levels and sectors pay as much attention to constructing strong health, mental health, education and family support levees for Katrina’s children in school, after school and in summer months as they pay to constructing levees strong enough to withstand another Katrina level hurricane. And demand that our leaders prepare better to prevent and respond competently to future disasters.

(6) Organize a Wednesdays in Washington ® and Wednesdays At Home ® witness, phone, letter writing and email campaigns and visits to your political leaders demanding mental health and health care for Katrina children now and a comprehensive health system for all children as a condition of your vote in November 2006. Also demand they stop and reverse the revenue hemorrhage from massive tax cuts for the top 2% of Americans, and all budget cuts in safety net programs for children and the poor which increase our nation’s human and budget deficits.

(7) Pray for Katrina children and families and for leaders of integrity who will work for justice for children and the whole community rather than for themselves and partisan political interests. Lift up the needs of children in your regular prayer meetings and prayer circles and through participation in CDF’s annual National Observance of Children’s Sabbath ® celebrations October 20-22, 2006, with an action witness for child health coverage.

(8) Demand investment in a quality integrated early childhood development system to help break the cycle of poverty, get every child ready to learn, and provide them the comprehensive support they need to avoid the Cradle to Prison Pipeline™ Crisis.

(9) Vote. Vote. Vote. Organize. Organize. Organize. Hold yourself and your political leaders accountable for how they vote for children.

Copies of the Katrina’s Children: A Call to Conscience and Action report are available online.