"Hitler's strategy shifts to a campaign of terror," said history teacher John Kelly. "He needs to destroy the British will to fight. The will to fight the good fight is as important as the physical necessities." Among the lessons we can learn from London's courageous response to the Blitz, Kelly said, is the critical importance of leadership in supporting the people's will to survive and recover. "We'll be looking at New Orleans," he told the students, "at how we meet the challenge of rebuilding. The devastation of New Orleans is unique in the U.S., but there are these European models — cities leveled, people displaced. How were they able to recover? If you look at Europe today, they've prospered, and they, too, have this history of disaster."
The class, designed by Howard Hunter, Kelly, and five other members of the history department, was part of a six-week interim program developed to meet the needs of Country Day students whose families returned to New Orleans in the fall — 170 students in kindergarten through twelfth grade, about 25 percent of a pre-Katrina enrollment of 720. Against all odds, the campus would be ready to reopen for a full program in January with three-quarters of pre-Katrina enrollment. In the interim, the faculty wanted something that connected each academic discipline to current events in the city. After all, the devastation was impossible to ignore. The fall program went on in upstairs classrooms while rebuilding went on below. The campus was covered with water when the levees broke, and two-thirds of the buildings flooded. All the grass died, along with most of the plants, and some trees. Contents of flooded classrooms had to be removed and remediated or thrown away. Sheetrock and flooring — including the gym floor — had to be ripped out and replaced. Yellow tape and orange barriers kept the students away from construction and out of the school's courtyard — except when they were helping their teachers and their parents lay new sod.
While the history class explored Rome, Paris, and London — all cities that underwent and recovered from devastation — in science, middle schoolers started their course with a study of hurricanes. Students wrote down what they wanted to know about hurricanes and then researched their questions on the National Hurricane Center website and reported back to the class. Their teachers gave them actual data on pressure and wind speed from Hurricane Ivan (a powerful 2004 hurricane that also struck the Gulf Coast) and asked them to analyze the data and look for trends. They plotted the data on paper graphs and then in Excel spreadsheets, drew a map view and a cross-sectional view of a hurricane, and wrote a page of reflection on what they had learned. The students themselves chose the topic for the next unit: wetlands. "They wanted to know why the wetlands are being destroyed," said science teacher Janet Bailey, "and the current plan for fixing them." They used what they learned to write letters to their representatives in Congress, advocating for wetlands restoration.
In English classes, students wrote, on the one hand, memoirs about their evacuation experiences and, on the other, analytical essays about published responses to Katrina's aftermath, including two by Country Day faculty members: Middle School Principal Katherine Dinh's Houston Chronicle piece, "Vietnam Revisited," which related her evacuation from Vietnam to her evacuation ahead of Katrina, and Howard Hunter's Times-Picayune op-ed piece, "If Only the Looters Had Read Hobbes," which connected Hobbes' dictum — that the government fails to uphold its end of the social contract with its citizens if it fails to educate them — to events in New Orleans in the aftermath of the hurricane.
For those who returned, the interim was a great opportunity to connect learning with life. Even so, throughout the session, uncertainty about the future was palpable. On the next-to-last day of the session, a Louisiana National Guard unit — a band in normal times, but stationed in town since September to help maintain security in the city — played an outdoor concert of holiday music in front of the school. The guardsmen wore battle dress uniforms because later that evening they would be patrolling the streets of New Orleans. After the band concert, students and faculty gathered on the front porch of the school to sing holiday songs, a traditional lower school event that now included all grades. They sang for parents, siblings, and the guardsmen themselves — and, from the porch, the singers could just see, behind the audience, the silhouette of the crane that, the next day, would complete the demolition of the upper school principal's house, flooded after the storm.
Uncertain Times
The concert was bittersweet for other reasons, too. That morning, Associate Head of School Carolyn Chandler, fighting tears, had spoken individually with each department chair about impending layoffs of more than a fourth of the faculty and staff. In common with other independent schools, Country Day had to resize itself after many of its families lost their homes, their jobs, or both, and were unable to return to the city. "This was the hardest thing," she later recalled. "It only became absolutely clear to me after hours and hours and hours of working with the consultant. The layoffs had to happen. There was no way out. In the December executive committee meeting, I suggested that we wait — maybe our numbers would improve, maybe more students would come back in January than we had projected. One of the trustees turned to me, and he said, 'Carolyn, we can't wait — this is about the survival of the school.' He was right; and, in fact, our projections turned out to be very accurate." About 75 percent of the students returned in January, with enrollment expected to increase in August 2006.Faculty workshops just after the close of the fall program were supposed to be a celebration of the faculty coming together after four months scattered across the country. Instead, a somber group, all too aware of the faces that were missing, picked at or ignored the breakfast buffet, and then gathered in the dining room annex to hear news that everyone already knew. "We've been dealt a terrible, terrible hand," Carolyn Chandler told faculty and staff. In the front row, a teacher tore a Kleenex in half to share with her neighbor. "Everybody in this room deserves to be here," she went on, "and everybody who's not here deserves to be here, too." Chandler and Head of School David Drinkwater met, one at a time, with each person who was laid off: "To say to one person after another that we couldn't keep them on the payroll was terribly difficult and painful. It's one thing to let people go because they weren't doing the job, but this was not the case. These were talented teachers and wonderful people."
In division meetings, the principals read the names of the people who would not be returning. "It was like when they read the names of the dead at the Vietnam Memorial," one teacher said later. People talked about their hurt and anger, and then went off to department meetings where they had to figure out how to divide up the courses among fewer teachers.
In addition to those laid off, some teachers decided not to return to New Orleans after the storm. Others decided during the second semester that they would leave Country Day at the end of the year.
It's hard to blame them. As Leigh Collins, director of counseling services, pointed out, adults in the community were struggling to cope with the loss and uncertainty. "They aren't sure if New Orleans is going to survive, if they'll have the same jobs," she said. "Everyone's life is so altered; just getting up in the morning and getting to work can feed into that chronic stress we're all experiencing. Adults don't see the city changing, they don't see the trash getting picked up; they're still fighting with insurance companies, and they're doing a lot of work on their houses without a lot of help. It's not a time when everyone can rally round and help the one person with a crisis, because the whole city is in a crisis."
Among those not returning, math chair Ann Rosenberg would be teaching at Episcopal High School of Houston, where she taught during the evacuation. Like many other faculty members, Rosenberg's house was flooded and uninhabitable, and she lived from January to June in one of 12 FEMA trailers in the lower
| WHEN THE LEVEES BROKE |
| WHEN HURRICANE KATRINA HIT NEW ORLEANS and the levees broke, 6,000 students from 11 New Orleans area members of the Independent Schools Association of the Southwest (ISAS) were displaced. Taking care of those students was an overwhelming challenge. "We determined very early on that one... of the big challenges was going to be simply communication among the schools," said Geoffrey Butler, ISAS executive director. "So our first task was to locate the heads of the schools. It was more than a week before we found all of them — they were in motels in Alabama, staying with relatives in Georgia, just like everybody else. Their big challenge was finding their own people — staff and families." ISAS identified two immediate needs: "One, we hosted weekly and sometimes twice weekly conference calls among the New Orleans heads. Two, we set up on our website a place where families could tell us where they were, because most of the websites down there weren't working." Volunteers in the ISAS office in Dallas spent two or three weeks trying to locate people, and then, "as we got reasonably good lists of who was in Dallas, San Antonio, Houston, Oklahoma City, wherever, we got that information and gave it to our schools in those cities, and asked them to get together and start dividing up kids, which they did." In Houston, Ned Becker, head of Episcopal High School of Houston (EHS) and former head of Metairie Park Country Day School in suburban New Orleans, had already pulled together all the private and parochial school heads in Houston. "Once those levees broke," he said, "I knew we were going to get a whole bevy of kids — all of us had full houses, but we were going to have to figure out how to handle this. When we got to a point where we'd taken all the kids and squeezed them in, I went to my board and we decided we'd take all the rest of the high school kids, if the other ISAS schools would give us teachers to teach them." Faculty from New Orleans independent schools arrived in Houston and signed on to teach the more than 90 ISAS students at EHS. Rob Hereford, Metairie Park Country Day's upper school principal and a former faculty member at EHS, "did yeoman's work," said Becker. "He headed up that New Orleans office, and he and I met six and seven times daily." In all, ISAS schools in Houston took in more than 700 students, and Houston schools in general took more than 1,500. Hundreds more were placed in other Texas and Louisiana schools and across the nation. Most of these schools did not charge displaced students tuition for the fall semester. "On the front side," said Becker, "we had people even on our boards who said, 'This better not affect my child's education,' but within a couple of days that just went away. There were nothing but positive effects. We have kids who've had very close relationships with kids in New Orleans that they never would have had." "In the short term," said Geoffrey Butler, "it's remarkable how, when the adrenalin gets going, people rise to the occasion and successfully make their way through a crisis. Now the less dramatic but harder long-term work begins: What's the future of the schools? How many people are going to stay in New Orleans? How many families are going to move to New Orleans? How are schools going to resize themselves? There are a lot of unknowns out there. The short-term stories are inspiring; the long-term stories have yet to be written. It's going to take a lot of courage not to get disheartened when, after a year or two, you're not back where you were. People have got to reset themselves to a changed community." Public schools, especially in New Orleans itself, have not fared as well as independent and parochial schools. "Katrina blew away the New Orleans public schools," said Barbara MacPhee, principal of New Orleans High School for Science and Mathematics. Sci High, formerly a half-day school operated by the Orleans Parish School Board, received a charter in October and now operates a full-day program. In July, The Times-Picayune reported that 57 public elementary, middle, and high schools would reopen in the fall. Of those, 33 have state or district charters, and 19 are part of the Recovery School District — schools which, before the storm, were taken over by the state department of education when they failed to meet state goals. "But what do they have?" asks MacPhee, referring to the "recovery" schools. "They have ruined buildings and scattered students and faculty." When a group of student volunteers from the Watershed School in Boulder, Colorado, entered Booker T. Washington High School in January to help clean and paint the school, they found dead rats, human waste, piles of stinking garbage, and scrawled messages on chalkboards in upstairs classrooms where people had sheltered to escape floodwaters. Some messages apologized: "We cannot justify some destruction of the building. However, most was necessary for survival. Please understand." Because some of the few remaining schools have selective admissions policies, there aren't many choices for students who can't meet entrance requirements. Sci High, with open enrollment but high expectations, saw its student body change significantly after the storm. "It was like starting all over," said MacPhee, "because 80 percent of the students were new to us. They weren't attracted to rigor like ours, but they had no other choice but us. "We worked very, very hard to convert these kids into people who recognize that education has a positive benefit for them. It was good for us; it was good for the students; and it is the issue in reforming schools in New Orleans — educating the kids who didn't make it into the selective schools." — Betsy Petersen |
"Katrina came like a lightning bolt," Drinkwater said. "Jacqueline and I saw, not something new revealed, but something that took on different meaning because it was nationally identified. For us, the awakening was a recognition of injustice, of who in the community was most heavily impacted and trapped. Because of our conviction that education can resolve some of those inequalities, having an impact on public education became critical for us."
Drinkwater's resignation, announced in October and effective in June, came "like a lightning bolt" for the teachers, some of whom were hurt and angry. Soon after Drinkwater's resignation, the board announced that Associate Head Carolyn Chandler would take over the day-to-day management of the school while Drinkwater focused on raising the five million dollars needed to cover Katrina-related losses beyond those covered by insurance and federal aid. (As of May 1, the school had raised 3.5 million of that amount). In May, Tommy Coleman, chairman of the board of trustees, announced that Chandler would succeed Drinkwater as head of school. "The board conferred with nationally recognized search consultants and came to the realization that we already had an A-plus candidate in residence at Country Day," Coleman told the faculty, who gave Chandler a standing ovation.
"One of the things I learned through all of this," Chandler said, "is the necessity of relaxing into the knowledge that each person must determine in a crisis like this, a catastrophic event like this, what his or her best path is.... That choice is each person's prerogative, and we've got to accept that, if that's what's best for them, it's what's best for the school and the students, and just bless them and send them on their way."
Student Stress
Relaxing into such knowledge in a world turned inside out, of course, is no easy feat. Students have shown themselves to be "extraordinarily resilient," said counselor Leigh Collins. "Our kids have been so articulate about their feelings.... Their awareness of hardship and what pain feels like has, in some ways, empowered them to realize that they can make a difference and make people feel better."At the same time," she added, "we've seen the effects of chronic stress. Some kids are keeping their emotions in more than they did in the past, because they think the little things that upset them aren't as significant as Katrina and its aftermath; they're not feeling as if they have a right to get help for those problems." When students do finally seek help, she said, "they tend to be at a more critical point than they were before, because they've been keeping it in longer. They've had months and months of dealing with homes that are a mess, sadness about the changes at school, friends who aren't here anymore, concerns about their parents. They really just want to go back to being kids again. And, to some extent, they can't.
"For young kids," she said, "the biggest concerns have been their sadness about friends who've moved away and stress in the family. They've been having some sleeping problems. They're afraid when it rains. They have fears about the next hurricane season. They need to be reassured about evacuation plans. They have times when they're unable to focus...."
Some students left parents behind in evacuation cities and moved in with classmates in order to return to Country Day. "Life has been very hard not having my family nearby," senior Gary Briggs wrote in a reflection on life after the storm. "This is one sacrifice that I had to make in order to get to the school that I love so much." Lindsey Argote and her sister Jen are still living with their parents, but "we have a FEMA trailer in the driveway in which my parents sleep," Lindsey wrote. "My sister and I are able to sleep upstairs [in the damaged house], but it has become a bizarre normalcy to go downstairs and outside to talk to my parents. I talk to my parents on the phone now more than I ever have, and I find myself wanting to go outside to talk to them in the trailer just because I feel so separated from them."
Many neighborhoods that students live in or drive through every day are still devastated. Beyond the trailers in Country Day's parking lot, blocks and blocks of formerly upscale houses are mostly uninhabited, gutted to the studs, with piles of trash in the driveway and weeds growing in the front yard. In other parts of the city, things are much worse.
Lower schooler Debra Amann put the strangeness of life in succinct perspective. When asked by a student from out of town to "paint a picture of what life is like in New Orleans now," she responded, "My uncle has a boat tied to his bedroom window."
And, Yet... Hope
Senior Clare Pirri, in a reflection for her senior humanities class, wrote that coming back to Country Day in January "was the best, because when we got back it was all fixed. It was like nothing had happened."So much has happened, of course. But Country Day has worked hard to make the school a comforting, welcoming, stable place. As Lower School Principal Marsha Biguenet put it, even parents would just hang out at school, because "it looked normal and people were cheerful here. School-as-oasis is a new role for us, a wonderful role for us. It's a gift we've given the community."
When students returned from hundreds of different schools in January — having performed well in challenging circumstances — they also came with new appreciation for the quality of the education they had received at Country Day, and an eagerness to learn. "They're focused," said history teacher Howard Hunter. "They're happy to be here."
Jen Staley found that the situation also "forced us to change expectations and to teach a different way, and it forced students to approach their studies in a different way." This happened, she said, not because "students gained this new love of Spanish and math and so on; I think it had more to do with the upheaval of the fall semester. As sad and anxious and distraught a time as it was, [there were good lessons] for the students. They experienced something outside themselves and their community and Country Day. They couldn't take it for granted as they had before — they didn't want to."
Personal experience helped them understand their subjects better, too. In history, said Howard Hunter, "they can understand disasters better. They have a little better understanding of ineptitude by the powers that be, of class conflict, race conflict — things we tend to look at on a very theoretical level. Without even meaning to, I was able to use the tragedy quite a bit."
Such changing perspectives have contributed to renewed interest not only in academics but also in community service. In addition to ongoing service projects, lower school students held a series of bake sales to collect money "because they were very concerned about the animals in the zoo," said Principal Marsha Biguenet. "They wanted to make sure they had everything they needed post-storm." Lower schoolers also vacuumed their building and distributed peanut butter sandwiches during lunch, helping to make up for reduced maintenance and kitchen staff. Upper school students landscaped houses for Habitat for Humanity, participated almost weekly in various clean-up programs, and collected clothing and school supplies for residents of St. Bernard Parish, which was devastated by flood waters.
Students and faculty have also witnessed an outpouring of time and energy by parent volunteers who picked up the slack left by staff departures. Parents worked in the kitchen, volunteered in the bookstore, shelved books in the library, and engaged in "green aerobics," which involved not only serious gardening by parents, but also hoards of little children messing around with mulch.
Members of Country Day's Assets Task Force, a student group whose mission is to focus on people's strengths in order to foster resiliency, have also hosted several school groups from out of town who have come to do community service in the city. "They tell their own personal stories and answer questions," said Leigh Collins. "They take seriously their role as educators — they want to teach kids who come in, create awareness of New Orleans that visitors will take back and share with their parents and teachers and classmates. They serve as diplomats for the city."
A group from Northfield-Mount Hermon School (Massachusets), in town to build houses for Habitat for Humanity, were struck by the generosity of people they met, said NMH teacher Sarah Rehbek. She noted that Mark Uddo, Country Day's director of food services, "had significant damage at his house, but he was still cooking a special dinner for us every night."
When they returned to Massachusetts, the Northfield-Mount Hermon students organized a letter-writing campaign, sending more than 300 letters to their Senators and U.S. Representatives, asking the national government to give more support to the efforts to rebuild."
Clearly, such volunteers are important to the future of New Orleans, at least as much for their political advocacy as for their hands-on help. "The country has got to step up and give us hurricane protection," said Marsha Biguenet.
Eight months later, life is still hard in New Orleans. Progress is slow, and the future is unknowable. "We all found out that you can survive horrific events and even thrive," said Marsha Biguenet. "We also learned — all of us, even the little kids — that life is unpredictable, even at its most basic. Our containers that hold stress are full, just from living in a city that is so severely damaged and whose future no one can predict. That affects all of us, the youngest to the oldest."
"We have to remember that the emotional side of things must be attended to," added Carolyn Chandler. "We're functioning well, we're working hard, but we still have to attend to our losses. The emotional intensity that we still feel can be exhausting. But I find, too, that the smallest things can make me really happy. I go outside of the house a kind family has let me live in — the most recent house; there have been several — and the confederate jasmine is blooming, it's a gorgeous day, and it's a joy to be alive and working for this wonderful school and with these fabulous people."
At the end of May, after a hard rain in the early afternoon, it was a gorgeous day for graduation as well. Sixty-one seniors sat on the wide front porch, girls in white dresses, boys in white linen suits, for the traditional ceremony. Of the twelve seniors who did not return to Country Day after the storm, nine came back to graduate with their class. Senior class president James Van Horn spoke to and for the class. Because of the hurricane, he said, "we were out there in the big bad world, facing new challenges every day. We learned a lot about ourselves." He said the hurricane prepared them for college better than any course: "It was nothing but a learning experience, a prep course in the real world, and that is why I believe we are the best-prepared class ever to graduate from Country Day.
"It just goes to show you what kind of community this is," he went on. "After all we have been through, we are back here tonight, up on this stage, just as it was meant to be on Sunday, August 28." The graduates listened, looking out at the front circle. Beyond their teachers, families, and friends, they could see the broad green lawn where the upper school principal's house once stood.