School districts aim to provide stability to displaced children

BLUFFDALE — Meshira is eating pizza at Camp BeBe, bouncing in a bright plastic chair. "Today," she says in her little-girl drawl, "is my-y-y birthday. I'm 6." Inside a plastic bag pinned to her shirt is $15 in small bills, gifts from people who have little themselves.

The Camp BeBe day-care center takes up two rooms in a cavernous building at the National Guard training center here, which these days doubles as a shelter for victims of Hurricane Katrina.

More than 300,000 school-age children have fled the Gulf Coast — their homes, schools and day-care centers flooded or flattened nearly three weeks ago.

And school districts in cities across the country are struggling to figure out what to do with Katrina's young evacuees, how to bring some semblance of normality back to their lives and keep them learning while their families search for permanent housing or wait to find out whether they can go home.

The order of the day, and it is a tall order, is to bring consistency to these children, many of whom have experienced multiple horrors.

First there was the killer storm and flooding. Then came days spent in the lawlessness of the New Orleans Superdome and convention center, where sexual assaults and murders were reported and where the old and infirm died in plain view. Finally there is the dislocation from lifelong neighborhoods and the twinned comforts of routine and extended family.

"These children need stability," said Sue Ann Payne, an administrator called out of retirement to reopen Douglass Elementary — a school ringed with razor wire east of downtown Houston — for an estimated 750 children who were evacuated to the Astrodome. "They're glad to be in school. They need to get their lives back together."

More than 3,000 students who fled Katrina have enrolled in Houston schools; more than 10,000 are being absorbed throughout Texas. But before they can start learning, the students need to feel safe, officials say. And that may take a while.

"We've had little girls tell us they like it here because they are no longer afraid of being raped," Payne said.

Cecil J. Picard, the Louisiana superintendent of education, figures the hurricane has displaced 186,000 students. About 20,000 of those have enrolled in other schools in Louisiana; the rest are believed to have scattered to every state but Hawaii. The U.S. Department of Education estimates that more than 125,000 Mississippi children are out of school.

Texas has borne the brunt of the educational load.