A long recovery ahead for Gulf Coast schools

For local educators, however, this makeshift campus of more than 400 students is a breakthrough -- the first sign of recovery for this hurricane-ravaged community.

It may be the only hopeful sign for quite some time. Katrina hit this low- lying coastal region with a 30 to 40-foot storm surge that toppled levees and sent water flooding into 47,000 homes and businesses.

Today, the 2,000-square-mile parish, just southeast of New Orleans, remains largely unpopulated except for those in emergency trailers. The local economy is wiped out, and the school district, which once served 8,800 students at 14 schools, is running out of money.

The aftermath of Katrina continues to reverberate in school systems across Louisiana. School officials still are dealing with storm-damaged school buildings, shattered budgets, or overcrowded campuses filled with the children of families who fled New Orleans and other flooded coastal communities.

“Some systems are completely wiped out,” says W.F. “Freddie” Whitford, executive director of the Louisiana School Boards Association (LSBA). “And even in northern Louisiana, where they didn’t get a big impact from the hurricane, they have a [sizable] number of displaced students.”

The pace of recovery across the state varies widely -- and, not surprisingly, largely mirrors the damage wrought by Hurricanes Katrina and Rita. In hard-hit New Orleans, where most of the city’s 117 schools were flooded and 30 to 40 percent will likely be torn down, the school system is having a hard time getting back on its feet.

Today, only a few score of employees are still on the payroll of the once-metropolitan school system, which took until last week -- 13 weeks after Katrina -- to reopen its first public school to a few hundred students. The district is a shadow of its pre-hurricane enrollment of 65,000.

That progress contrasts greatly with St. Tammany Parish, just north of New Orleans across Lake Pontchartrain. Although a number of schools suffered serious storm damage, all but four have reopened. What’s more, nearly 32,000 students, or roughly 90 percent, have returned to class.

That’s not to say the hurricane’s impact is no longer keenly felt in the district. Some schools are operating on a double shift to accommodate overcrowding. And among its students are nearly 4,000 displaced children, whose accommodation complicates the administrative and financial challenges to the hurricane recovery effort.

That assessment assumes the school district has the money to stay in operation. But, for many districts in Louisiana, hurricane-related costs have put a huge strain on budgets.

That’s the predicament of the Jefferson Parish school system, where a worst-case scenario puts the district as much as $60 million in the red by the end of the fiscal year.

Many factors are hitting district purse strings. In addition to costly building repairs and the unanticipated expense of educating nearly 6,000 displaced students, the district, under the state’s education funding formula, looks to lose more than $1.3 million from enrollment losses related to the evacuation and subsequent scattering of parish families.

More threatening to the district’s finances is uncertainly over local sales and property tax revenues -- which account for 58 percent of the system’s budget -- that have not yet bounced back to pre-hurricane levels.

“We’re going to be impacted severely very soon,” says district spokesperson Jeff Nowakowski. “There was no sales tax [revenue] . . . in September and October. We had zero revenue. We’re having to dip into our reserve funds.”

The financial picture is far worse for school systems like New Orleans and St. Bernard Parish, where the tax base has been largely wiped out. It will take years for homeowners and industry to rebuild -- if they choose to return. For now, both districts, and many others, are looking to borrow heavily to stay financially afloat.

“Next year is going to be a harder year, because we did have some reserves, but those reserves are exhausted,” says St. Bernard’s Dysart. “And there’s no operating money coming in.”

The scope of the financial challenges becomes even clearer when talk turns to the cost of repairing, rebuilding, and restocking the state’s damaged schools. Although officials are still tallying the costs, it’s estimated that New Orleans alone could spend more than $1 billion to restore its school system.

Yet, even inland school systems are feeling the pinch in lost sales tax revenues. East Baton Rouge, which has served as many as 8,000 displaced students after the hurricanes, will receive a state allotment of only $1,250 for each of these children to offset the cost of educating them, even though the district will spend thousands more on each student who stays through the rest of the school year.

As a result, school officials are pinning their hopes on federal promises of disaster relief. To date, school officials report mixed success in getting help from the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA). Although millions of dollars in loans have been announced, and trailers for classrooms and homeless school personnel have started to arrive, some districts are still waiting for promises to turn into practical help.

The weeks immediately after Katrina were the toughest on local school officials. They rushed to assess the damage to flooded buildings, cleaned and repaired those that could be put back into service, and, outside the hardest-hit areas, reached out to evacuees and enrolled displaced children in school.

If things are a bit calmer now, a return to normalcy remains elusive, school officials say. Some school systems are crowding 40 students into classrooms that comfortably sit 28; while others are still waiting for students to return. A number are struggling with a shortage of books, desks, and other school supplies, while trying to help students cope with the loss of home, friends, family, and familiar surroundings.

“Counseling has been made available -- and been utilized -- by students, employees, and parents,” Roan says. “We don’t lose sight of the fact that many families are going to be displaced for a long period of time, living in circumstances that are less than ideal.”

In St. Bernard Parish, some of the 50 or so remaining employees -- out of an original staff of 1,200 -- are living in small trailers adjacent to the parish’s single operating school. The rest are commuting from other parishes.

In Jefferson Parish, officials are seeking trailers for homeless teachers. About 300 to 400 are living with friends and relatives.

In the hardest-hit areas, a major concern is whether displaced students will ever come back. Officials in St. Bernard Parish don’t expect to see enrollment climb above 10 percent of pre-Katrina levels in the next few months. In New Orleans, some officials estimate that as many as half the district’s students will never return.

As a result, some school districts already have announced potential layoffs, cuts in pay, or revisions to benefits.

More federal money would help, say school officials. But only time will tell when -- and how quickly -- the state’s public education system recovers from Katrina’s wrath.

Although a few charter schools, outside the school board’s control, already were in operation, last week’s opening of Benjamin Franklin Elementary School was greeted with rejoicing by residents who see the city’s recovery linked closely to the fate of the school system.

Yet, the event was overshadowed by legislation signed by Gov. Kathleen Blanco that stripped the Orleans Parish school board of authority over 102 of its 117 schools -- and put most of the school system under state control. State lawmakers says the takeover was a response to years of financial mismanagement and poor academic performance.

The Gulf Coast school system of 2,300 students was hit hard by Hurricane Katrina. Schools were closed for two months, and when they reopened, most students started school in portable classrooms provided by FEMA or in a few salvageable classrooms.

Other school districts in the southern half of the state also took a beating, reports the Mississippi Department of Education. It estimates as many as 300 schools were damaged, and the cost to repair them could exceed $668 million.

A budget reconciliation bill approved last month by the Senate would provide $450 million to help hurricane-damaged schools reopen. It also would give $6,000 per student ($7,500 for students with disabilities) to school districts that have enrolled displaced students.

The latter provision was rejected by a House committee, however, because the per-pupil payments amount to a massive voucher program overseen by state departments of education. A conference committee will need to resolve the dispute.

NSBA has been lobbying to remove the voucher proposal, arguing that the federal government should move quickly to provide additional direct aid to school districts.