Routine of a Class Replaces the Chaos of Katrina

Meshira is eating pizza at Camp BeBe, bouncing in a bright plastic chair. “Today,” she says in her little girl drawl, “is my-y-y birthday. I’m 6.” Inside a lunch baggie pinned to her shirt is $15 in small bills, gifts from people who have little themselves.

The Camp BeBe day care center takes up two rooms in a cavernous building at the National Guard training center here, which these days doubles as a shelter for victims of Hurricane Katrina.

More than 300,000 school-age children have been uprooted from the Gulf Coast -- their homes, schools and neighborhoods flooded or flattened nearly three weeks ago.

Now school districts across the country are struggling to figure out what to do with Katrina’s young evacuees, how to return some semblance of normalcy to their lives and keep them learning while their families search for permanent housing or wait to find out whether they can go home.

The order of the day, and it is a tall order, is to bring structure back to these children, many of whom have experienced multiple horrors.

First there was the killer storm and flooding. Then came days spent in the lawlessness of the New Orleans streets, Superdome or convention center, where sexual assaults and killings were reported and where the old and infirm died in plain view. Finally there is the dislocation from the neighborhoods they have known all their lives and the twin comforts of routine and extended family.

“These children need stability,” said Sue Ann Payne, an administrator called out of retirement to reopen Douglass Elementary, a school ringed with razor wire east of downtown Houston, for an estimated 750 children who were brought to the Astrodome. “They’re glad to be in school. They need to get their lives back together.”

More than 3,000 students who were displaced by Katrina have enrolled in Houston schools; more than 10,000 are being absorbed throughout Texas. But before they can start learning, the students need to feel safe, officials say. And that may take awhile.

“We’ve had little girls tell us they like it here because they are no longer afraid of being raped,” Payne said.

Cecil J. Picard, the Louisiana superintendent of education, figures the hurricane had disrupted the lives of 186,000 students. About 20,000 of those have enrolled in other schools in his state, while the rest are believed to have scattered to every state but Hawaii. And the U.S. Department of Education estimates that more than 125,000 Mississippi children are out of school.

Texas has borne the brunt of the educational load.

In Southern California, the Los Angeles Unified School District has enrolled 237 students who arrived with their families or through the help of private relief agencies. A handful of students also have landed at Orange County campuses.

More than 500 evacuees have come through Camp Williams, the National Guard training center in this suburb of Salt Lake City. The Jordan School District, Utah’s largest, set up an education center for their children. At its peak, the education center had 42 children enrolled. The number of students has since dropped to about half that.

To keep from running afoul of federal law, school district officials don’t call it an official school. It is augmented by state-sponsored Camp BeBe, which provides child care for those as young as 7 months and activities for older children when the education center closes at noon.

Living through an event like Katrina “is something terrible developmentally,” said Dr. Victor Carrion, a child psychiatrist at Lucile Packard Children’s Hospital at Stanford University and director of its early life stress research program.

Although children respond to trauma differently, “school is a very good thing” for all of them, he said. “As soon as possible, you want to make sure you establish some kind of routine.”

In Houston, Douglass Elementary, a cinderblock school, closed in May because of declining enrollment. Its main goal now is to provide the displaced children, who range from kindergarteners to fifth-graders, with a normal day.

The school marquee proclaims, “Welcome Little Angels to Your Land of Learning.” A bulletin board in the hallway that says “Louisiana Proud” soon will display the students’ photos. Forty teachers have been hired at Douglass, including eight from New Orleans who fled their homes too. Counselors and nurses are at the ready.

“These children look wonderful today in their new clothes and pigtails, but they’re very needy, and we’re going to be there for them,” Payne said. Since the school opened Sept. 9, there has been some “acting out” from frightened and angry children -- and quite a few stomach aches.

Earlier this week, before the Astrodome was emptied of evacuees, buses from the Houston Independent School District arrived shortly after 8 a.m. School employees and shelter volunteers created a path to the buses.

Students held onto a rope as they marched to the big, bright vehicles. Many carried new backpacks and wore new shoes, which were purchased by their parents with money distributed by the Red Cross and the Federal Emergency Management Agency. “Come back and tell me something you’ve learned,” a volunteer called out.

“I want to go to school, but I’m a little scared,” said Hartinique Perdue, 5, hugging a stuffed bear. Said Reginald Keys, 10: “I thought maybe I’d never go back to school again.”

Some of the younger children left behind at the Astrodome sobbed as their sisters and brothers boarded the buses

“It’s OK, baby, he’s coming back this afternoon,” Kawanee Martin, 32, told her inconsolable 3-year-old, Mecciah, as his brother Jermaine, 8, left for school. “After the Superdome, he thinks every time somebody leaves, he’ll never see them again,” Martin said over Mecciah’s tears.

As an icebreaker on the first day of school, second-grade teacher Judy Yeager read her class a story about a polar bear named Albert le Blanc. The students then were asked to describe and draw the bear. “At first they seemed very sad, but once we got to read, they perked up and started to draw,” said Yeager. “What these children need is a little bit of attention and love.”

But in Ammer Smith’s classroom, with cursive letters pinned above the chalkboard, the need seemed a little greater. The fourth-grade teacher assigned an essay to all of her new charges, asking them to answer what seemed like a simple question: Why do I like Houston?

But the responses were anything but simple. “I like Houston because people are friendly and there are guards at the bathrooms at the Astrodome at night,” said Dwayne, 9, on his first day of class after fleeing New Orleans. “Not like at the Superdome.”

A dozen small heads nodded in somber agreement.

Under a federal law called the McKinney-Vento Act, homeless children are not allowed to be put together in a separate school; they must be educated at their last permanent school or the campus closest to their current home. The Houston district was able to open up Douglass specifically for the children of Katrina because the closest elementary school to the Astrodome shelter could not accommodate all the evacuees.

South of Salt Lake City, the Jordan School District, dealt with the federal law by setting up an education-related activity program -- but not an official school -- at Camp Williams, district spokeswoman Melinda Colton said.

The children have spent half-days there in small groups, divided by age, focusing on math and language arts, physical education and art. Counselors have been on hand, and former Utah Jazz basketball star Karl Malone has spent some time with the children.

Barbara Duffield, policy director for the National Assn. for the Education of Homeless Children and Youth, said Texas school districts “should get awards for their heroic efforts.” But she is critical of Utah’s response.

Here, Katrina’s victims are “just flat out not in any regular school,” she said. By attending activities at Camp Williams instead of being absorbed into the district, the young evacuees “will start school late,” she said. “They could have been enrolled and attending school throughout the entire period of their dislocation.”

Colton defended Utah’s provisions as a way to give traumatized children activities they needed while complying with federal law. The children, she said, were responding well to the certified teachers and counselors at Camp Williams.

“The one thing that our counselors keep saying is that structured time is so important,” Colton said. “The kids, along with their parents, are establishing a new life. They are redefining what normal in their life is.”

For the younger children like Meshira, normal is Camp BeBe, which hums with the controlled confusion of every preschool and child care center but is punctuated with a sadness all its own.

In Room A, where the diaper set plays, nap time begins at 9 a.m., as soon as they come into the cheerful little room with its new, oatmeal-colored carpet and posters of Clifford the Big Red Dog. The reason: It’s difficult to sleep in busy family dormitories.

“Look at this baby,” said Jolene Holbrook, who works for the state’s child care resource and referral agency, as she cradled sleeping Aalyiah in her arms. “This one’s been trying to sleep all day. It’s so noisy in the dorms.”

Aalyiah is 7 months and teething. She wears shiny white shoes with Velcro tabs and a brand-new denim jumper. Her brother Charles, 2, toddles up as the sleeping child starts to wake up; he bends to kiss her. They are part of half a dozen or so Room A regulars, there from 9 a.m. to 5 p.m. as their parents look for housing and jobs or just get a little respite.

“I go to lay her down, and she just grabs for me,” Holbrook says of Aalyiah. “So I don’t lay her down.... . The babies in [the normal] separation anxiety stage are having problems. That’s about 9 months to a year. And then they get stranger anxiety. What a special time to be homeless.”

Across the hall in Room B, the older children of Camp BeBe play. And cry. And paint. And cry. And have lunch. And, on this day, cry a little more than usual. A cold, strong storm hit northern Utah earlier this week with hard rain and noisy hail. For many of the children, it was the first bad weather since the hurricane that forced them from their homes.

Terrell, 5, saw the rain and started to weep, said Haley Hansen, a substitute teacher from the Head Start program.

“He’s all, ‘I hate the rain. Make it go away,’ ” Hansen said. “Poor kid. It made me cry.”

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La Ganga reported from Bluffdale and Perry from Houston. Times staff writers Roy Rivenburg and Joel Rubin in Los Angeles and Ashley Powers in Baton Rouge contributed to this report.