Katrina's Students
Saturday, April 29, 2006

A Difficult School Year

A three-by-four-inch picture postcard and a small trophy are all that remain of Montrelle’s large collection of dance and academic awards. Hurricane Katrina’s floodwaters broke or twisted or scattered everything else.

“In a way I want to go home, but it’s not really much to go back to right now,” says Montrelle, a pleasant, well-spoken 14-year-old who had just started classes at her dream school when the hurricane struck. An excellent student, Montrelle had won an academic scholarship to St. Mary’s, an all-girls Catholic school in New Orleans.  “Ever since I was a little girl, I had wanted to go to St. Mary’s,” she recalled. “I was so happy when I got there. I had just made the dance team. The week the storm came, we were going to start practice.”

But two days before Katrina turned on New Orleans, Montrelle, her mother, Cheryl, and little sister, Maliyah, loaded the family car and drove west. Cheryl’s sister worked at a New Orleans hotel and her boss found a hotel room for the young family in Houston. Not long afterward, FEMA placed the family in a tidy, modern apartment in southwest Houston, one of the city’s highest crime areas.

“It’s all right living here,” Montrelle said. “What I worry about is the school system and the courses. They can’t tell me whether my credits will transfer when I go back…No one can answer that for me.” Montrelle misses performing as a New Orleans Hornets’ basketball “Stinger,” an elite troupe that entertains fans at halftime. And she misses her friends. “Usually, in New Orleans, your friends live five to 10 minutes away from you. Now, they’re all in different states.”

While Montrelle and her mother fret over the academic implications of moving from New Orleans to Houston and — they hope — back again, Cheryl expresses confidence that Montrelle, always a go-getter, will prevail.  In another Houston apartment, Carolyn, another mother from New Orleans, is more concerned about her son, Christopher. 

In their home, they count on it like clockwork. Thursday is fight day. Four days into the school week and, at Kashmere High School in Houston, the local and New Orleans kids collide. The weekly bouts have led to suspension or expulsion for several of the two dozen students who fled The Big Easy and landed at Kashmere. Christopher, 16, worries that he could be next.

“I want to get out of Kashmere,” he says, solemnly. “They always fighting at Kashmere.”

Each side blames the other for the tension and violence. Christopher says the Houston kids “don’t like the way we talk” and taunt the New Orleans evacuee students about their clothes, many of them hand-me-downs since most families fled the disaster with nothing. So far, Christopher says, he has managed to avoid coming to blows, but admits it’s getting harder, not easier, and adds pointedly, “I ain’t scared.”

From the looks of it, he’s not happy either. Christopher doesn’t smile. He wishes aloud that he could transfer to another school; he shrugs off questions about how he’s doing, conceding only that he misses his house in New Orleans and his old friends.  He is also uncertain about things getting better with time. People in position to make a difference have let him down, he says, claiming the newcomers no longer feel welcome but resented.

Carolyn, Christopher’s mother, says she is prepared to make a permanent home in Houston, mainly because there’s nothing to return to in New Orleans. She is confident she will find work and that life for the family will improve.  But she hopes things settle down quickly for Christopher. He used to be a decent student and never had trouble in school, she said. Now, he’s beginning to falter. “Every week — every Thursday — I have to go up to the school. Why? Houston kids want to fight the New Orleans kids,” Carolyn said.

Then a broad smile erupts. “Today was a blessed day,” she says, “because, guess what? It’s Thursday and we didn’t have to go to school.”

Christopher and Montrelle are just two of thousands of students affected by Hurricane Katrina who are struggling to fit into new schools and keep up with their studies at the same time that they try to adjust to everything else in their lives that has been uprooted.  We need to 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 educational disparities.

The Children’s Defense Fund is operating emergency CDF Freedom Schools™ programs to help provide homework help, reading enrichment, and art and music to children affected by the hurricanes.  For a copy of CDF’s report Katrina’s Children:  A Call to Conscience and Action and to learn more about Freedom Schools and other ways you can help, visit http://www.childrensdefense.org/.