Be sure to read the NYTimes piece by Sam Dillon below. Incidentally, I had a conversation with my graduate students last night about the usage of the term, “refugees,” to describe Katrina’s victims. We agreed that it “others” them, treating them like foreigners. The Austin Am-Statesman used the term, “evacuees” in yesterday’s headlines. This is perhaps a more positive or at least neutral term. Just a suggestion.
I also learned today that there were about 145,000 Latino/as, most of them immigrants, who were also displaced. They are an even more marginal group among the marginalized. I know that the Red Cross is looking for Spanish-speaking volunteers.
Respectfully,
Angela
By SAM DILLON
School districts from Maine to Washington State were enrolling thousands of
students from New Orleans and other devastated Gulf Coast districts
yesterday in what experts said could become the largest student
resettlement in the nation's history.
Schools welcoming the displaced students must not only provide classrooms,
teachers and textbooks, but under the terms of President Bush's education
law must also almost immediately begin to raise their scholastic
achievement unless some provisions of that law are waived.
Historians said that those twin challenges surpassed anything that public
education had experienced since its creation after the Civil War, including
disasters that devastated whole school districts, like the San Francisco
earthquake and the Chicago fire.
"In terms of school systems absorbing kids whose lives and homes have been
shattered, what we're going to watch over the next weeks is unprecedented
in American education," said Jeffrey Mirel, a professor of history and
education at the University of Michigan.
The vast resettlement was already under way last week, with schools in
Baton Rouge, La., Houston and other cities near the Gulf Coast enrolling
some students. Yesterday, officials in cities including San Antonio;
Phoenix; Olympia, Wash.; Freeport, Me.; Memphis; Washington; Las Vegas;
Salt Lake City; Chicago; Detroit; and Philadelphia reported enrolling
students or preparing for their arrival.
The total number of displaced students is not yet known, but it appears to
be well above 200,000. In Louisiana, 135,000 public school students and
52,000 private school students have been displaced from Orleans, Jefferson,
St. Bernard and Plaquemines Parishes.
President Bush, speaking with reporters at the White House yesterday,
thanked the nation's educators "for reaching out and doing their duty," and
he said that Secretary of Education Margaret Spellings was working on a
plan to help states absorb the educational costs but gave no hint of what
kind of assistance might be provided. The Department of Education set up a
Web site to coordinate private donations to schools enrolling displaced
students.
"They said we could brace for about 500 kids," said Sue Steele, coordinator
of homeless student programs for the public schools in Wichita, where buses
carrying 1,800 storm victims were expected to arrive yesterday, part of
some 7,000 headed for Kansas.
Many students were concentrated in districts along an arc from the Florida
Panhandle west through Georgia, Tennessee, Arkansas and Texas.
The Santa Rosa County School District in the Florida Panhandle has enrolled
137 students, said Carol Calfee, a district official.
"And we still have folks coming in," she said. "They're walking through the
door and some of them just have nothing, so it's really hard." The local
United Way has said it will try to buy school supplies for every displaced
student, she said.
The crisis poses new challenges for Ms. Spellings, including financial. The
Department of Education's budget this year for homeless student programs is
about $61 million, which she said was insufficient.
Ms. Spellings, who has spent her first months in office fighting a backlash
by local educators and state lawmakers against the federal law known as No
Child Left Behind, is also hearing calls from advocacy groups that she take
emergency measures that could be controversial.
The National Education Association, the nation's largest teachers union,
asked her on Friday to waive the accountability provisions of the law for
schools in the hurricane's path as well as in Texas and other states
receiving large numbers of students, a move Ms. Spellings said she was
reluctant to take.
Private companies that operate online courses or charter schools are urging
her to use emergency powers to authorize them to enroll displaced students
at the Houston Astrodome and other shelters across the nation.
Ms. Spellings has invited 40 education groups, including the P.T.A. and
teachers unions, to meet at the Department of Education today to discuss
disaster recovery efforts. Reg Weaver, president of the N.E.A., which has
challenged No Child Left Behind in federal court, said he immediately
accepted the invitation.
But in a separate letter, he also asked Ms. Spellings to use her powers to
waive provisions of the law, which requires school districts to raise
student scores on standardized tests each year by a percentage set by each
state, a goal known as making adequate yearly progress.
"Until these children, their teachers, districts and families gain their
footing under these extremely difficult circumstances, I encourage you to
implement the provisions in N.C.L.B. that deal with the impact of natural
disasters on testing and adequate yearly progress," Mr. Weaver's letter
said.
Ms. Spellings is consulting with state school superintendents as she
considers whether to waive the law's accountability provisions in some
cases, said her spokeswoman, Susan Aspey. One consideration is how many
displaced students that individual schools or districts enroll; those with
higher concentrations may be more likely to receive waivers, Ms. Aspey
said.
"There is no one-size-fits-all approach," she said.
Even before the storm, hundreds of schools that had failed to meet the
federal law's proficiency requirements for several years, most of which
educate the urban poor or non-English speaking immigrants, were facing
sanctions that include school closings and the firing of staff. Thousands
of others were expected to be placed on academic probation or labeled as
low-performing.
Theodore R. Sizer, a visiting professor of history at Harvard, said that
unless the law's accountability provisions were waived during the
emergency, they would add tensions to the resettlement crisis.
"Imagine you're the principal of a big high school in city X, and your
scores are above the state minimums, so you're doing fine with the law, and
suddenly you have 300 displaced kids," Mr. Sizer said. "That not only
brings crowding but also means that on the next exams your scores could
plummet and the federal law will say you run a terrible school."
The Bush administration must also make decisions about another hotly
debated issue in public education: charter schools. The National Council of
Education Providers, which represents the nation's largest commercial
school management companies, has asked the Department of Education to
authorize it to enroll students housed at emergency shelters in
Internet-based courses offered by its companies.
The National Council's Web site yesterday highlighted its request to the
department to establish a "national virtual charter school" that would
"serve evacuees wherever they are."
"Once students have access to computers and connectivity - borrowed,
donated or shared - companies are standing by to waive state restrictions
and log these students on," the Web site said. The restrictions in question
include enrollment caps in state laws that apply to charter schools. The
National Council wants the federal government to waive those laws during
the emergency.
Jeanne Allen, a paid consultant to the National Council who is also
president of the Center for Education Reform, a nonprofit organization,
said she delivered a draft "Emergency Public Charter School Act" to members
of Congress yesterday.
·
Copyright 2005 The New York Times Company
September 7, 2005
School Routine Provides Welcome Change From Chaos
By JOHN M. BRODER
HOUSTON, Sept. 6 - Before the sun came up on Tuesday morning, Elejaine
Gobert had her five children scrubbed and dressed in white shirts just like
those they wore for school back in Mississippi, before Hurricane Katrina
ripped up their lives.
The school-day routine was a welcome relief after a chaotic escape from the
storm and a week in the Red Cross shelter behind St. Peter Claver Catholic
Church in the northeast corner of Houston. There was little for the
children to do during the day at the shelter, and Ms. Gobert was insistent
that their schooling continue, despite their having lost everything in the
storm.
"That's the most important thing," said Ms. Gobert, who said she was a
nurse. "They don't need to be here all day depressed at the shelter. Back
at home, they love school."
Just after 7 a.m., a bus from the North Forest Independent School District
pulled into the church lot to pick up Ms. Gobert's five youngsters and the
three children of Webb and Theresa Pierce, who fled to Houston from
Marrero, La., just ahead of the hurricane.
As an orange sun rose, off they rode to a new school, new teachers and new
classmates in a scene that played out thousands of times in Texas alone on
Tuesday morning, as the storm-tossed clung to the one constant raft in
their lives.
Texas school officials said they could not provide a complete count of
children of the storm now enrolled statewide; their latest estimate, at the
end of last week, was 6,100.
That number is expected to soar this week, as school officials enter the
large shelters at the Astrodome and two large convention centers in Houston
to begin registering school-age children. Terry Abbott, spokesman for the
Houston Independent School District, which will absorb the largest number
of storm evacuees, said the district expected to sign up at least 5,000
children from those shelters. In addition, he said, several thousand
students now staying in hotels, outlying shelters or in private homes will
enter the Houston school district in coming days.
The Houston district, the state's largest, can accommodate as many as
13,000 new students, Mr. Abbott said. The district has already decided to
reopen two elementary schools that were closed last spring because of
declining enrollment and plans to hire hundreds of teachers. Among the new
hires, Mr. Abbott said, are dozens from Louisiana, and scores who were in
the applicant pool in Houston last spring.
The influx of students will be another big challenge for Houston, which
trumpets its school district as one of the most successful in the nation,
with a high rate of achievement under President Bush's education law, the
No Child Left Behind Act. But last year, the system was found to have
vastly underreported its dropout rate and manipulated its 10th-grade test
scores.
The State of Texas has suspended its required ratio of one teacher for
every 22 students and waived immunization requirements for displaced
students, a spokeswoman for the Texas Education Agency said. The state will
also reimburse all costs, including those for free breakfasts and lunches,
for districts that take in more than 50 new students. In Dallas, school
buses picked up about 150 children from downtown shelters on Tuesday and
delivered them to schools in the city.
As the buses pulled up, many children eagerly clambered on board.
"Some of them jumped for joy," said Ivette Cruz Weis, a spokeswoman for the
Dallas Independent School District. "They were so ready" after a week
sitting around the shelters, she added.
At A. G. Hilliard Elementary School in northeast Houston, four of Ms.
Gobert's children and the three Pierce youngsters were assigned to classes
based on what grade they said they had been in back home. The eldest of the
group, John Gobert, 15, was assigned to a magnet high school because he is
a ballet dancer.
The leader of Hilliard's second-grade teaching team, Erica Chandler, took
Nashia Gobert, 7, by the hand and showed her to a locker. Nashia slipped
off her empty Nickelodeon backpack (obviously a donated item, because it
had the name Leslee Ivy in bold letters on it) and lined up for breakfast,
a carton of Golden Grahams and a half-pint of 2 percent milk.
"These kids are amazing," Ms. Chandler said after she had placed Nashia in
a classroom. "I thought they'd be a little upset, a little distraught. But
they talk about what they went through just like adults."
Ms. Chandler said she took several of her other storm-displaced students to
a Jack in the Box restaurant over the weekend and broke down crying at the
stories they told. One girl, Gabriel Santiago, had deep bruises on her side
from sleeping jammed against a pole at the Superdome in New Orleans, where
her family was huddled on the concrete floor. Ms. Chandler said the girl
said to her, "I told my mom, why are you complaining? We're still alive."
"They show no signs of what they went through," Ms. Chandler said. "They're
not despondent and they're not acting out in any way."
Sharon Wyckoff described herself as the "principal, cook and custodian" at
Hilliard Elementary, which has more than 500 pupils. The school has taken
in 22 evacuees. One thing she wanted to do, she said, was to find them red
shirts and blue pants, the school uniform, so they feel a part of the
community.
School guidance counselors say that the shock of relocation and sudden
placement in an unfamiliar school are bound to affect many of the children.
The president of the Texas Counseling Association, Sadie Woodard, said
youngsters were as susceptible to post-traumatic stress symptoms as adults.
She said she expected to see anger and aggressive acts, depression,
difficulty concentrating and other signs of trauma as thousands of new
students poured into Texas schools in coming weeks.
"This is going to present a number of different counseling problems," said
Ms. Woodard, who is also the assistant superintendent for guidance
counseling at the 85,000-student Cypress Fairbanks Independent School
District in northwest Houston.
"They've been displaced from their homes, living in shelters; they have to
adjust to that," she said. "They are going to a school where they don't
know anyone. In many cases they waded through deep water and saw dead
bodies and lost their homes and everything they had. It's going to cause
all kinds of emotional responses."
Ms. Woodard said that 400 evacuated children were now enrolled in her
district and that she expected a couple hundred more. Each has met with a
counselor and has been encouraged to recount his or her experiences in the
disaster. The older children are being assigned a fellow student to help
show them the ropes.
"When they came here, they were tired, hungry, frustrated and in shock,"
she said. "Once they get through that phase, there will be other problems
to address."
She added, "These kiddos are going to need support for a very long time."
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