The Lost Children of Katrina
A decade after the hurricane, New Orleans' community grapples with the effects of missed schooling and mass displacement.
Ten years ago, the Lee family evacuated from New Orleans to a Houston neighborhood so rife with hostility for evacuees that the ice-cream truck refused to stop for them. At the corner store, the clerk threw their money back rather than serve them. Peers called them "refugees," as if they weren’t from this country, and suggested they "swim home" to New Orleans rather than burden Houston, said Devante Lee, who was 11 when Hurricane Katrina hit.
At the new school that Devante’s 14-year-old sister, Cessileh, attended, young New Orleanians regularly fought Houston students. So their mother kept her sons home rather than expose them to harm.
They ended up missing school for an entire year.
"It hurt my mom, us not being in school. At that time, she felt like she’d let us down," said Devine Lee, who was 13. "But she was terrified. They were shooting us out there." Her fears were confirmed when a teen they knew casually from New Orleans was killed in Houston, he said.
Devine, who is outgoing by nature, would spend hours on a nearby basketball court, nurturing dreams of playing professionally. Devante, who is quieter, remembers mostly staying at home, trying to hold onto his New Orleans accent and identity.
An untold number of kids—probably numbering in the tens of thousands—missed weeks, months, even years of school after Katrina. Only now, a decade later, are advocates and researchers beginning to grasp the lasting effects of this post-storm duress. Increasingly, they believe the same lower-income teens who waded through the city’s floodwaters and spent several rootless years afterward may now be helping drive a surging need for GED programs and entry-level job-training programs in the city. It’s no coincidence, they say, that Louisiana has the nation’s highest rate of young adults not in school or working.
Many of the Americans who today lack both jobs and diplomas may have been Katrina-era adolescents, who often suffered such high levels of trauma and instability that learning became nearly impossible. It was "like throwing seeds at cement," said Lisa Celeste Green-Derry, a New Orleans-based education researcher.
A decade ago, the Lees’ mother hadn’t anticipated that her sons would lose an entire school year. The circumstances seemed temporary, just a stopover until New Orleans cleaned and re-opened housing and schools. Then, three months after Katrina, the state of Louisiana announced a complete reconfiguration of New Orleans’ notorious public schools in what then-Governor Kathleen Blancocalled "the opportunity of a lifetime."
In justifying the state takeover of the schools, which would later be handed over to charter-school operators, Blanco assumed that most evacuee children had transferred to superior schools outside of New Orleans. "Parents have new expectations for what schools should be and what they should provide," she said at a presentation announcing the legislation, just a few months after Katrina. "These families will only return home when we can meet these new, and higher, expectations."
Few imagined that the education of so many evacuee children would be disrupted for so long.
About half of Katrina evacuees were said to have hailed from badly devastated New Orleans, many from flood-prone, high-poverty neighborhoods. Most children had attended the city’s public schools, notorious for dilapidated buildings and classes from which fewer than half the students graduated. While some displaced children thrived in better schooling elsewhere, countless others didn’t have an opportunity to settle down: Many low-income New Orleans evacuees spent several years after the storm in nomadic exile, moving among family members’ residences or in search of jobs or housing.
Early on, children’s advocates noted that serial moves and school absences were prevalent. A 2006 study by the Children’s Health Fund and the National Center for Disaster Preparedness, part of the Mailman School of Public Health at Columbia University, warned that 20 percent of displaced children were either not enrolled in school or not attending regularly, missing an average of 10 days a month. The families interviewed for the Mailman study had moved an average of 3.5 times by six months after the storm, with some moving as many as nine times. Not surprisingly, evacuee children couldn’t keep up with their studies. Four and a half years later, Mailman researchers found that more than one-third of Katrina’s displaced children were at least one year behind in school for their age.
While disasters are sometimes portrayed as events affecting everyone equally, children from more fragile families are more likely to be traumatized and to recover more slowly, said Lori Peek, a sociologist who co-directs the Center for Disaster and Risk Analysis at Colorado State University. After observing 650 displaced New Orleans-area children, Peek and her collaborator Alice Fothergillfound that poorer children were more likely to be exposed to Katrina’s floodwaters, resulting in "challenges concentrating in schools, higher anxiety levels, and more behavioral problems."
Similarly, Mailman’s researchers found that evacuee children were more than four times more likely than the average child to show symptoms of serious emotional disturbance, which can stunt kids' ability to advance socially, emotionally, and academically.
Lower-income children were also more likely to be displaced far from their homes, to move often, and to encounter bullying and discrimination, Peek and Fothergill found. "The children whose lives were most disrupted and whose social support systems and family networks were shattered were left with few tools or resources to pick up the pieces," they concluded. Those who conducted Katrina research in the early years wonder what happened to the displaced children they met. Thousands didn’t return, and the population of children in New Orleans dropped by 43 percent between 2000 and 2010.
When the Lee family returned to New Orleans about a year after the storm, several schools had reopened, but much of the system remained in chaos. Devante, who came back first with an aunt, enrolled in a school where classes were held in temporary trailers run by high proportions of interim teachers. He said his campus sometimes shut down for the day without notice.
For thousands of New Orleans schoolchildren, these experiences were the rule, not the exception. "I think 90-percent-plus of my students didn’t learn for a year after Katrina," said Matthew Feigenbaum, a former dean at Renew Accelerated High School, which works with over-age students who have fallen behind.
Despite the missed class time, when they returned to New Orleans the two Lee brothers were placed into the "right" grade for their ages. But Devine said he was unable to focus in an environment where few teachers seemed like they had control of their classrooms. "They were getting run over," he said. Even worse, after missing "a substantial amount of work," Devine was lagging academically. During his junior year in high school, he made a deal with his mom that he’d drop out and work toward his GED.
Researchers and others are trying to understand the impact that the displacement had on kids’ education, a task complicated by evacuee return rates, which are as low as 50 percent in some analyses. This summer, the New Orleans-based Education Research Alliance is slated to release an analysis of how the disruption affected test scores for New Orleans students. But the study The Lost Children of Katrina — The Atlantic:
