After the Storm
by Rebecca Bidwell-Hanson '00 CMDIS
Two years after graduating from Penn State, it was time for a drastic change in my life. Mad at an about-to-be ex-boyfriend and disillusioned with my New York City editorial job, I fast tracked a decision I’d been weighing for several months and signed my matriculation paperwork for Teach For America. A major move and five weeks of training at the TFA summer institute landed me in an elementary special education position in Edgard, Louisiana.
The first year was an emotional roller coaster. The poverty in the small community on the West Bank of the Mississippi was striking. Education levels among adults were surprisingly low, meaning our students also came into school academically behind from day one. Without public transportation, business, or much industry around, homes and lifestyles were meager—many times I stopped to wonder if this majority African American population felt much different than their enslaved ancestors on the large plantations just minutes from our school. I’d never seen anything like this before.
I’d also never seen such joy and enthusiasm as in the children and many of the teachers I worked with that year. My students gobbled up every piece of knowledge my co-teachers and I had to give them. They loved math, they would tell me every day as we approached the subject. They taught me chants and songs on the playground and brought homemade tea cookies and pecan candy on holidays. They rounded out my life and showed me the great rewards that come from great challenges. They gave me hope that I—and many others like me—could impact the lives of children and make a difference.
Greater impact without the bureaucracy of the school system was what I sought as I prepared for a new challenge in the summer of 2005. Little did I know another drastic change was on the way.
My husband Paul and I had just returned from our honeymoon in Prague when I was offered a project manager position with Communities In Schools of New Orleans (CISNO). CISNO is a non-profit organization whose mission is “to champion the connection of needed community resources with public schools in New Orleans to help young people successfully learn, stay in school, and prepare for life.” The Communities In Schools National Network is recognized as a leader in integrated school-based services and dropout prevention. In this new position, made possible by the generosity of a local funder, I would be managing behavior support programs, an after-school reading tutorial, and parent engagement programs at William J. Guste Elementary, which is located in a financially depressed but high-spirited area of New Orleans just blocks from the Superdome. I’d met the principal of the school and the executive director of CISNO, and I was looking forward to the start of my employee orientation on August 29, 2005.
Rather than report to training that morning, I sat with Paul and our dog in a hotel room in Baton Rouge, Louisiana. We waited for news as winds picked up and power went out—Hurricane Katrina was rolling through, reaching across the Gulf Coast and much of South Louisiana. It wasn’t until the next morning that we heard news of broken water mains and breeched levees. There would be no CISNO training, and we wouldn’t be going home for a while.
After a few weeks with my husband’s parents in California, I started to receive email messages from CISNO’s executive director and board members. That generous funder withdrew funding to attend to relief needs. The superintendent of the Louisiana Department of Education announced that no public schools would reopen in Orleans Parish that school year. Within CISNO the debate was on: Should we fight to keep operations going or close our doors and cut our losses?
Just as poverty couldn’t crush the spirit of my former students in Edgard, Katrina couldn’t crush the will of the people of New Orleans. They started coming back, and, of course, they brought their kids. I knew schools would begin to open, slowly maybe, but they would. And I was sure public schoolchildren and families would need Communities In Schools now more than ever.
CISNO’s executive director, Donna Cavato, and I were determined to do what we could to help. Even though our office was inaccessible, the schools we were slated to work in no longer existed, and we were the only two staff members planning to return to New Orleans, we felt we had to make something work. But how would we make the greatest impact with so few staff members and such a small budget?
We started by reaching out to as many former school representatives and community organizations as possible. We anticipated that children returning to New Orleans so soon after Hurricane Katrina would need trauma resources, medical care, uniforms, school supplies, after school programs, and academic support. Schools that were physically damaged would also need volunteers to work on school renovations. The only way we could provide all of that was to form a network of resource partners and act as a broker and coordinator of their resources and services for various schools. Starting with two schools and an informal needs assessment, and collecting every dollar and item that anyone could think to donate, we were eventually able to ensure the provision of many of these resources to more than 4,000 students in ten New Orleans public schools—all within nine months of Hurricane Katrina.
During the course of the year, we obtained enough grant funding to increase our staff to five people, and I was asked to step up as program director for the organization. This has allowed us to expand our reach across more schools. With 57 schools open in New Orleans right now (of the original 127 that existed pre-Katrina), all in varying states of development, there are always unmet needs. I am proud to say that my staff and I work tirelessly to match schools in need with local and national resource providers that meet those needs. We are also working toward the evaluation of these services and their impact on at-risk kids. Are we truly keeping kids from failing and dropping out? I’m not sure, but I know we’re connecting at-risk students with opportunities they’ve never had before, and I see the seeds of success in their eyes every day as I visit our schools with my three site coordinators. We’re also planning for the day, not too far into the future, when we will be able to provide targeted wrap-around services for the most desperately at-risk children in each of the schools where we work. And then, I will be able to say just how successful we were at keeping kids in schools—and I’ll be able to list by name all of the reasons for rebuilding CISNO and the public schools in New Orleans post-Katrina.
