School Gets a New Start in Baton Rouge

It was just a few days after they’d been cheering together for the Brother Martin Crusaders at the first football game of the school year, but Scott Williams, Josh Frederick and Greg Rando had scattered to the winds.

Football coach and math teacher Williams sat in his sister-in-law’s house in Baton Rouge, wondering whether he could ever return to the New Orleans high school he’d attended himself. Josh, 16, idled the hours away in a distant cousin’s blacked-out house in Greenwood, Miss., longing for his schoolyard friends. Assistant principal Rando, squeezed into his niece’s starter home with 27 other relatives near the Texas border while his wife, a nurse, evacuated her hospital in New Orleans.

They all had fled before Hurricane Katrina hit.

But hours after the 17th Street Canal levee broke and the Crescent City was submerged, administrators were tracking down teachers, and students were text-messaging their friends.

Word spread throughout the diaspora -- Brother Martin High School was rising anew.

On Monday, classes will begin at an affiliated high school in Baton Rouge. Most of the 600 students will be from Brother Martin’s original student body of 1,500 boys. The new classes will be held from 3 p.m. to 10 p.m. Like Brother Martin, Catholic High School is run by the order of the Brothers of the Sacred Heart.

“Never once did I think that we wouldn’t be back,” said Brother Martin Assistant Principal Gabrielle Macaluso, as the halls thrummed with jubilant students during registration.

Any continuity is a blessing to the evacuees from New Orleans, a place where some families have lived on the same blocks for generations and where many boys attend the same schools their grandfathers did.

Katrina has upended their lives.

“There’s some people, your friends and families, whom you’ll never see again,” said Laurie Frederick, Josh’s mother. Her brother is planning to settle in Orlando, Fla. Her father, a police officer, remains on duty in Jefferson Parish. Her mother and daughter went to Lake Charles, La., while Laurie, her husband and Josh linger in Baton Rouge.

The school and its parents have gone to remarkable lengths to remain together.

Brother Martin teachers are bunking with their counterparts from Catholic High School. Rando commuted 100 miles from his refuge near the Texas border to help set up operations. Parents have moved their families to Baton Rouge, in some cases buying homes so their children can continue their education.

“No matter how much you lose,” said Macaluso, whose son is a junior at Brother Martin, “you want your kids to have stability.”

Kirk Farrelly has lost two homes. His neighborhood of Lakeview is still submerged. And his family’s weekend house on the Mississippi Gulf Coast was flattened by the hurricane. “We’re 0 for 2,” the gangly 17-year-old said.

The Farrelly family fled to Jackson, Miss., to stay with Kirk’s aunt. But after several days, Kirk got the news that Brother Martin would reopen.

Kirk’s father had been mulling over a move to Baton Rouge because the food product company he works for is headquartered here. News of the school clinched it. The family bought a house in the city last week, and at registration, Kirk stood beside his old friends from Brother Martin.

“You’re in a whole different city,” he said, “but you’re still with your old schoolmates.”

Next to him stood a grinning Robert Reichert, another 17-year-old senior. “I haven’t seen a friend for a week and a half,” he said.

Reichert and other students told of holing up in distant relatives’ homes with no other teens around, of being stuck playing hand-held video games all day and wondering what awaited them when school began.

“Being with our friends makes it so much easier” to basically start life over, said Brad Brisbi, 18, as he stood next to classmate Max Poche. The two have attended the same schools their entire lives.

Brother Martin and its predecessors have been adapting to changes in New Orleans since the Brothers of the Sacred Heart -- founded in France in 1821 to educate the poor -- opened their first school in the Crescent City amid its post-Civil War boom in 1869.

The school, St. Aloysius, was in the French Quarter, the oldest part of the New Orleans. A century later, the city center had moved eastward, toward Lake Pontchartrain, and the French Quarter was becoming a sometimes-seedy entertainment district rather than a residential neighborhood. The Brothers of the Sacred Heart followed the fleeing families and opened a second school in the growing Gentilly neighborhood closer to the lake. They then closed Aloysius and merged the two faculties into a new school named after one of their order, Brother Martin.

Nowadays, the Gentilly neighborhood of raised, wooden houses is mostly home to older couples. The families have moved to the expanding belt of suburbs, and Brother Martin draws its students from all over the metropolitan area. Some commute an hour each way to attend the school -- which, though 90% white, is known as a working-class institution that preserves the character of the city.

It’s one of many Catholic schools in New Orleans that play a prominent role in public and private life.

“In New Orleans, the center of everything is people’s [church] parishes and schools,” said Brother Martin math teacher Tricia Zimmer. “New Orleans is unique in the way Catholic schools are the centers of everything and where communities are formed.”

New Orleans is unique in that its high schools have enacted their hurricane evacuation plans with dreary regularity over the years. When Brother Martin Principal Gene Tullier launched his school’s plan on Saturday, Aug. 27, nothing seemed that unusual.

Staff secured the school and backed up the computerized records twice, then left town -- expecting to return by the following Tuesday, as usual.

Tullier evacuated to Baton Rouge. As he and other displaced New Orleans residents watched the waters of Lake Pontchartrain gush into their streets that Tuesday, Tullier went straight to Catholic High School.

“I felt this was the most likely place I could make contact with someone,” he said.

Tullier wasn’t the only one.

“A lot of our parents, faculty members and students just started showing up here on the chance that maybe someone knew something,” he said. “Everyone’s under stress, and ... when they walk in and see someone they know, a teacher they had, you can see the relief on the kids’ face. Some of the parents started crying.”

Immediately, the Brother Martin staff began talking about reviving the school. Catholic High School was supportive. With cellphone service hobbled, administrators didn’t know how to track down the rest of their school community, but excited students found that text messages could get through where regular voice calls could not.

“They figured out the text-messaging before we did,” said English teacher Justin Fleetwood, 31. “They taught us a lot.”

Armed with the technical know-how, the administration quickly tracked down teachers. For many, it was a welcome call. Others beat the administration to the punch.

Zimmer had fled to Houston. From there she instinctively called Catholic High School to track down friends from Brother Martin. “I found out they were already looking for us,” she said.

She and her husband drove to Baton Rouge. As they crossed the Texas border and saw the familiar sign welcoming them to Louisiana, military convoys were headed toward New Orleans. “It was very emotional,” she said. “The whole time we were just mourning the loss.”

Over Labor Day weekend, the staff made the formal decision to open Brother Martin in Baton Rouge. Forty-eight hours later, the teachers and administrators had called 1,100 students and posted a notice on Catholic High School’s website announcing the upcoming registration.

There will be no athletic programs at the new Brother Martin, and the annual $5,200 tuition can be paid monthly. That’s because the administration knows that, however much families may want their children to stay, they may have to abandon southern Louisiana.