New Orleans 'calling children home'

NEW ORLEANS — Promising the government will not abandon this disaster-shaken city and coastal region one year after Hurricane Katrina raged ashore, President Bush beckoned to those who fear for the city's future: "New Orleans is calling her children home."

"I have returned to make it clear to people that I understand we're marking the first anniversary of the storm, but this anniversary is not an end," Bush said Tuesday on the stage of New Orleans' oldest public school, ready to reopen next week. "I come back to say that we will stand with the people of southern Louisiana and southern Mississippi until the job is done."

Gratitude, patience and frustration became the themes of an anniversary commemoration of the hurricane that inundated New Orleans and ravaged the coasts of Louisiana and Mississippi, displacing hundreds of thousands of people who still have not returned one year later. For all the progress made in a year since the storm, the president and other federal officials here said, much work remains before everyone can return.

"Don't confuse a plan with action," said Lt. Gen. Russell Honore, commander of the National Guard's recovery efforts here, speaking with reporters in the basement of the flood-damaged school as Bush prepared to deliver an anniversary address in the auditorium upstairs.

"It's not the kind of thing you can run from Washington," the general said of federally funded recovery plans that Louisiana and Mississippi still are carrying out — with more than $110 billion committed, but less than $50 billion spent. "I have empathy for the people who are waiting" for aid to flow, he said. "If this were simple, it would have been done."

Bush chose the historic St. Louis Cathedral, and the city's oldest public school, Warren Easton Senior High School, as the twin stages for his anniversary commemoration. The school will reopen as a charter school, sponsored with public money but run by a private organization drawing students from throughout the city as part of a school reform plan.

"From our beginnings as a nation, the church steeple and the schoolhouse door have been enduring symbols of the American community," Bush said. "And so it is today in New Orleans ... Here in this city, there was flooding on a biblical scale.

"New Orleans is going to rise again," the president said, striking the theme of a New Orleans jazz anthem as he promised that people will return as schools reopen and work is created. "Seeing these people coming home ... seeing these old saints to come marching back is what you need ... New Orleans is calling her children home."