Displaced Katrina teens tested at schools

By Erin McClam

updated 10:53 a.m. ET Nov. 14, 2005

HOUSTON - Hurricane Katrina catapulted teenager Charbresha Carmouche on a personal odyssey from her New Orleans home, where 8 feet of water poured through the roof, to the convention center — where yes, she says, it was that bad.

Finally, when the storm and all its chaos subsided, she landed at Houston’s Westside High School, a sprawling red-brick expanse set on 50 acres among attractive gated communities.

Ask Charbresha what has been most difficult about moving to Houston, and the talkative senior offers a multiple-choice array of possibilities: Struggling to keep up in class. Putting off plans to graduate early. Dealing with stray snide remarks from local kids.

Then, in a voice that always sounds as if she is close to tears, she finds her answer.

“Two of my friends, I never heard from since the hurricane,” she says. “And nobody that went to school with us, nobody that used to hang with us, they don’t know where they are.”

She falls briefly, uncharacteristically, silent. Then: “It’s a question. I wonder sometimes whether they’re dead, or ... Where they at? Who knows?”

370,000 schoolchildren displaced
Trying to keep in touch with friends flung far by Katrina — or, more than two months later, just trying to find them — is but one of the head-spinning ways life has changed for the 370,000 schoolchildren displaced by the hurricane.

The adjustments they have had to make, and the ways they improvise in their new lives, seem as wide and as incomprehensible as the hurricane’s diaspora itself.

They grope for a sense of home, of life before the storm, in small ways. They wear New Orleans class rings, or display fashions that are suddenly, awkwardly out of place.

In classrooms already threatening to burst at the seams, they struggle to make up lost ground and grasp new material. Some of them excel, and vow to clutch diplomas, if only to make their parents proud. Some of them fail. A few shut down, or walk away.

They wear donated clothes, often in school colors, and hear taunts from the hometown students in inevitable turf wars. They look the other way, or seek out counselors, or drop their books and fight.

Principals and teachers and social workers, the unwitting first responders, will tell you this massive uprooting is probably easier for elementary school children, who can absorb change like sponges absorb water.

But for middle school and high school children, this personal earthquake comes at an already awkward time in life, when fitting in and finding true friends was hard enough at home, let alone in Rhode Island or Oklahoma.

‘A great sociology experiment’
Westside High alone swelled past 3,000 students with the addition of 300 teenage evacuees from Hurricane Katrina, about 200 of whom remain enrolled.

The natives and the newcomers have marked their turf. Paul Castro, the principal of Westside High, can walk through his gleaming cafeteria after the closing bell and point you to where the New Orleans kids hang out and where the Houston kids hang out.

“I don’t think anyone has understood it,” he says. “This would be a great sociology experiment.”

No administrator or math teacher or 10th-grader has ever been through such a massive relocation before. There are no guidelines for anyone in this enormous Class of Katrina on how to get by. And so it is just that — an experiment.

Middle and high school are not lived grade to grade, or even test to test, but day to day, one bell to the next.

Members of the class of Katrina are intimately aware of the upheaval in their lives: It shows itself in the morning’s decision of what to wear, of which potential new friends to embrace and which to eye warily.

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