School boards adjust to life after hurricane
10/11/05 -- For Houston school board member Kevin Hoffman, one of the most memorable moments of Hurricane Katrina was standing at a shelter near the Astrodome when the first bus of evacuees arrived from flood-ravaged New Orleans. It was a school bus of teenagers -- driven by a teenager.
“It had been commandeered by a 15-year-old student” who’d heard on CNN that Houston was taking in evacuees, he says. “It was full of other students -- children but no parents -- that came in about 10 o’clock at night.”
For school board members along the Gulf Coast, the aftermath of Katrina was a time for confronting unprecedented situations. And at the Council of Urban Boards of Education (CUBE) Annual Conference in Las Vegas, Sept. 29-Oct. 2, many spoke of the challenges they faced, the selfless dedication of their staffs, and their hopes for the future.
In New Orleans, hope in the aftermath of Katrina was, at first, the domain of only the most optimistic. According to school board member Jerry Fahrenholtz, the school board initially was confronted with disaster: The district’s 65,000 students were gone -- scattered as evacuees across the nation -- and there was no certainty how many would ever return.
At the same time, at least 80 flooded schools were a total loss and would need to be bulldozed to the ground.
Yet, weeks later, Fahrenholtz -- as well as other leading citizens in the city -- are seeing a silver lining in this dark cloud. Many of the district’s schools should have been condemned years ago, they say, and with emergency relief funds promised, the district has the opportunity to start anew with clean, safe, modern school buildings.
“There’s going to be some distress and trauma, but we’re going to come back,” he promises. “We’re in New Orleans. We’ve faced bubonic plague, influenza, yellow fever, all kinds of hurricanes, and more floods than you can read about in the Bible. Now our job is to provide a free and appropriate education to whoever walks through our doors.”
And that job may begin sooner than anticipated. Although many surviving schools may not reopen until next year, the school district announced it would open some schools as early as next month.
The East Baton Rouge Parish (La.) school board watched its community open its arms to evacuees, and the school district took in 8,000 students, many lacking clothing and stable housing and suffering from the trauma of being uprooted from their homes.
To meet this challenge, the board made an unprecedented decision during the crisis, says board Vice President Noel Hammatt. Recognizing that communications would be spotty following the hurricane -- and that decisions would need to be made quickly -- board members turned over “extraordinary powers” to the superintendent to make policy decisions.
“To a person, the board recognized that our first priority was to take care of the material and psychological needs of our new students and new employees,” he says.
In doing so, the board basically told school administrators to worry less about rules and regulations than about people’s needs, Hammatt says. “We decided it was easier to ask for forgiveness than permission” from state and federal officials.
For Hammatt, a heartening sight was the way school employees reached out to evacuees. Teachers and administrators went into shelters in the evenings and on weekends to find and enroll students and get them into a classroom.
“We wanted them to know there was a place for them,” he says, adding that the superintendent shared with the board her thinking: “We don’t have the money to do the things that need to be done, but I’m going to do it anyway.”
In Mobile, Ala., where hurricanes are no stranger, the school board has taken some satisfaction from a farsighted policy: It had signed contracts with builders to make school repairs a top priority in the wake of a natural disaster. Soon after Katrina’s winds died down, workers began putting schools back in order -- without the need to put out bids or compete with homeowners for contractors.
As a result, the county quickly reopened all but one of its 105 schools, even though 28 will need significant repairs in the future, says board member David Thomas.
Many school board members also spoke of the outpouring of support from school boards across the nation. Hammatt received numerous e-mails from school boards wanting to help -- and at least eight truckloads of supplies were sent by other districts to help outfit evacuated students.
Such charity reveals the strength of school boards, he says. “Local school boards opened their doors and took in students without ever wondering where the federal government stood. We did the job that needed to be done. In my mind, there’s no better justification for local control and school boards than what we saw in the last few weeks.”
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