Texas Schools Move to Enroll Evacuees

Jaronda Wilson, 29, had her first happy day Wednesday since Hurricane Katrina forced her and her family to abandon their home in New Orleans and flee for their lives nine days ago.

They spent several “hellish” days at the Superdome waiting to be rescued and have found the shelter at the Astrodome to be crowded, noisy and confusing.

But Wednesday, Wilson got her children -- Sheridan Allen, 6, and Paul Wilson, 5 -- registered for school, and suddenly life looked brighter.

“Now we can start a new life in Houston,” she said. “Education is everything for my kids, and now they’re going to get one.”

With Katrina evacuees numbering in the hundreds of thousands, school districts in Texas and other states are scrambling to find classrooms for the newly arrived children.

Texas officials expect the evacuation to add “tens of thousands” of students to the state’s 4.4-million-student public school system.

The Houston Independent School District expects the most. It has enrolled 1,885 so far and believes that it can accommodate up to 10,000. It’s part of what Harris County Judge Robert Eckels, who heads the local emergency management team, calls Houston being the “shock absorber” for the national relief effort.

To get those children enrolled and calm the fears of parents that their children will be adrift, the district Wednesday set up a registration operation at the Reliant Center across from the Astrodome. The pace was brisk and the mood upbeat as parents eagerly stood in line to fill out the paperwork.

This being Texas, where football is king, coaches were at the Houston registration operation prowling for would-be football players. “I think I’ve seen several already,” said Tom Fitzgerald, the district’s athletic director.

“These children are here now, and they’re ours to take care of,” said school board member Arthur Gaines. “It’s a challenge, but we’re up to it.”

For starters, the district is reopening two schools that had been closed because of declining enrollment. There are plans to hire about 400 teachers, some from flooded-out communities in Louisiana.

In Dallas, the school district there sent buses to the city’s two main shelters for evacuees, Reunion Arena and the Dallas Convention Center, so parents and students could visit the schools ahead of time.

“We want the children, and more importantly, their parents, to feel comfortable with the surroundings after all they’ve been through,” said district spokesman Donald Claxton, who said the district had enrolled about 500 students.

The Texas Rangers baseball team and the Dallas Stars hockey team have donated money to provide the new students with school uniforms, which the district requires in the lower grades.

In Austin, the school district moved to hire more bus drivers. And in San Antonio, the superintendents of 50 districts and 27 charter schools met to devise a plan to divvy up the students.

To speed the process of enrolling the students, Texas school officials have waived immunization requirements for students, lifted a cap on class size and allowed for a temporary one-year credential for out-of-state teachers.

Rebecca Sloman, 22, was pleased to know that the Houston district -- which has 200,000 students -- runs a pre-kindergarten program that her daughter, Kariell, 4, is eligible to attend.

“She deserves the best, and maybe Houston can provide it,” Sloman said.

Midget White, 34, was worried that her children, Melvin, 13, and Victoria, 14, would “just be on the streets getting into trouble if they didn’t have school.” She was among the first parents at the registration booth in the Reliant Center.

Marquin Lewis, 16, was ready to be a student again: “Are there pretty girls in Houston schools?” he asked. “If so, just put me in school.”

The influx of students comes at a time when school financing is a particularly controversial topic in Texas.

After the state was sued for allegedly not spending enough, Gov. Rick Perry convened three special sessions of the Legislature. Still, lawmakers could not agree on a new financing plan.

But state and local school officials said they expected the federal government to provide reimbursement for the cost of educating children forced from their homes by Katrina. Reimbursement could come through the Federal Emergency Management Agency or various federal programs for homeless and low-achieving students, officials said.

Reimbursement from the federal government, however, is a sore point in Houston, which had 55,000 homes flooded during Tropical Storm Allison in 2001. That storm did $5 billion in damage.

“We’re still waiting for our last checks from Allison,” Houston Mayor Bill White told reporters Wednesday.

Although the largest number of evacuee children will be in Texas schools, districts elsewhere also are working to find room for the new arrivals and to ease the concerns of parents.

“Our counselors are working with the parents now,” said Music McCall, spokeswoman for a school district in San Diego. “Some of the parents aren’t sure whether to enroll their children if they’re just going to be moving again soon. It’s their decision.” San Diego has received 80 evacuees, including 25 school-age children.

Steven Hyden, executive director of Region 5 of the Texas Educational Service Center, which helps local districts in the Beaumont area, said one challenge facing teachers would be in matching the Louisiana curriculum with that of Texas.

The skills that Texas students are expected to have mastered by a certain grade, he noted, may not be those expected of Louisiana students. “Each state does things different, and teachers will have to accommodate that difference in their students,” he said.

Many of the evacuee children will fall into what educational bureaucrats call the Title I category, meaning their schools are eligible for federal assistance.

“Our district is 79% economically disadvantaged, so we deal with that population on a daily basis,” said Mike Keeney of the Aldine school district outside Houston, which has 57,000 students. “We’re going to do everything possible to help these kids assimilate into a normal routine.”

Administrators said it would take some parents a while to feel comfortable enough to enroll their children. “For some, it means coming to grips with the idea that they’re here to stay, at least for awhile,” Hyden said.

Counseling will remain a concern even after the hurly-burly of the first few weeks, officials in several districts said. Many of the children have witnessed life-and-death struggles.

“We think we’re prepared if any of the children have a delayed stress reaction,” said Jacquelyn Tolbert, assistant superintendent of the 9,300-student North Forest district, which has received several hundred new students. “We’ve got our crisis counseling teams at several schools ready to mobilize on a moment’s notice.”

Latoya Jones, 30, whose daughter Karien Rarnee, 13, is enrolling in a school in Houston, hopes that no such counseling is needed. “When your child is in school, you know you’ve done right by them,” she said.