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Many Children Lack Stability Long After Storm

It is very hard to read this
article, the pain is so palpable. These people
were abandoned and continue to be abandoned. A
BBC radio feature on "Trouble the Water," a
documentary about the human cost of Hurricane
Katrina, is devastating. Combining home movie
footage and original material, they chart one
couple's journey to restore their lives.

By Shaila Dewan

BATON ROUGE, La. — Last January, at the age of
15, Jermaine Howard stopped going to school.
Attendance seemed pointless: Jermaine, living
with his father and brother in the evacuee
trailer park known as Renaissance Village since
Hurricane Katrina in 2005, had not managed to
earn a single credit in more than two years.

Not that anyone took much notice. After
Jermaine flunked out of seventh grade, the East
Baton Rouge School District allowed him to skip
eighth grade altogether and begin high school.
After three semesters of erratic attendance, he
left Baton Rouge in early spring of this year
and moved in with another family in a suburb of
New Orleans, where he found a job at a Dairy
Queen.

A shy, artistic boy with a new mustache,
Jermaine is one of tens of thousands of
youngsters who lost not just all of their
belongings to Hurricane Katrina, but a chunk of
childhood itself.

After more than three years of nomadic
uncertainty, many of the children of Hurricane
Katrina are behind in school, acting out and
suffering from extraordinarily high rates of
illness and mental health problems. Their
parents, many still anxious or depressed
themselves, are struggling to keep the lights
on and the refrigerator stocked.

For some, like Kearra Keys, 16, who was
expelled from her Baton Rouge school for
fighting and is now on a waiting list for a
G.E.D. program, what was lost may be
irretrievable. For others, like Roy Hilton, who
stands a head taller than his third-grade
classmates, recovery may lie in the
neighborhood school near the New Orleans duplex
where his family has finally found a home.

The families profiled in this series were among
the last to leave Renaissance Village when the
Federal Emergency Management Agency closed it
in May. The government was trying to nudge the
poorest, least-educated and sickest evacuees
toward self-sufficiency — or at least toward
agencies other than FEMA.

More than 30,000 former trailer residents
landed in apartments paid for by the federal
government until March 2009, a small fraction
are in the hands of private charities or
government housing programs for the disabled,
and thousands more simply traded in their
trailers for other temporary quarters. Case
managers promised by FEMA to help these
families find permanent homes have yet to start
work in Louisiana.

Many of the adults are at least partly victims
of their own poor choices. But the children are
another matter. For them, the experts prescribe
the one thing that has been hardest to obtain:
stability. Their parents sometimes work against
that goal.

Jermaine’s father, Joseph Griffin, has had
trouble holding on to steady work and said he
did not see much value in his son’s attending
school this semester because he had already
missed so much class. “If he doesn’t get no
credits for it, what sense does it make for him
to sit up in there?” Mr. Griffin said. “I was
going to try to get him a job.”

The health problems of Hurricane Katrina
children are daunting. When the Children’s
Health Fund, whose mobile health clinics have
provided the only doctors and psychologists
available to many of these families, reviewed
the charts of children seen this year,
researchers with the Mailman School of Public
Health at Columbia University found that 41
percent under age 4 had iron-deficiency anemia
— twice the rate for children in New York
City’s homeless shelters. Anemia, often
attributable to poor nutrition, is associated
with developmental problems and academic
underachievement.

Forty-two percent of the children, who lived in
trailers laced with dangerous levels of
formaldehyde, had allergic rhinitis or an upper
respiratory infection, the study found.

More than half of those ages 6 to 11 had a
behavior or learning problem, yet in the East
Baton Rouge School District children can wait
for as long as two years to be tested for
learning disabilities.

“Not only has their health not improved since
the storm,” the study said, “over time it has
declined to an alarming level.”

Medical care, counseling and child care are
hard to find. In that respect, LaTonya London
has been lucky. Her youngest children, born
while the family lived at Renaissance Village,
have two of the 16 Early Head Start slots —
down from 200 right after the storm — reserved
for evacuees of Hurricane Katrina in Baton
Rouge. The baby, Edbony, was born with no
forearms. Darren, 2, was two months premature
and suffers from asthma and delayed speech.

The eldest of Ms. London’s five children,
Darrell, 7, has developed behavior problems so
serious that he has already been suspended
several times from first grade, causing Ms.
London to abandon plans to start vocational
training, she said. In response, she has
resumed counseling sessions for Darrell at the
mobile clinic.

Dr. Irwin Redlener, the director of the
Children’s Health Fund, notes that there is as
yet no comprehensive method of tracking these
children, who are supposed to be the subject of
a long-term study by the Centers for Disease
Control and Prevention.

The key to giving these children a future,
doctors and educators have long said, is
providing them with a sense of stability — a
home that seems permanent, a school where they
can put down roots. The recommendation is
underscored by the gains made by those families
that have found a toehold.

After months of looking, Laura Hilton, who is
functionally illiterate, finally found an
apartment in New Orleans for her and her two
sons, George, 17, and Roy, 11, that was within
walking distance of Roy’s school. Laura’s
husband was murdered in New Orleans after the
storm, and at the trailer park the Hilton
children attended school only fitfully. Roy was
known for being both endearing and utterly
ungovernable.

Now Roy, who is at least three grades behind
and needs special education, tutoring and
counseling, can hardly be persuaded to leave
school when the last bell rings. He helps
teachers on their work days and shows up for
Saturday detention even when he has not
misbehaved. He fights less, and recently
volunteered to sit in the principal’s office at
recess to keep from getting into trouble and
losing his field-trip privileges.

“When he first came in, I was like, ‘Why me?’ ”
Wanda Brooks, the principal at the James Weldon
Johnson Elementary School, said. “As a school,
you’re frustrated — why didn’t somebody look at
this when he was 10?” But then she got to know
Roy.

“They begin to talk to you, and you begin to
realize what the child went through,” Ms.
Brooks said. “He has not gotten over his dad’s
death.”

Roy has received special attention from a male
role model, Edward Williams, the football coach
at Johnson. On a recent morning, Mr. Williams
went into Roy’s classroom to find him sulking
at his desk while the other children practiced
a dance routine.

Drawing Roy aside, Mr. Williams told him: “You
got to get up and move around. You got to try.”

Moments later, Roy was dancing.

But life outside the trailers has not been a
relief for every child. With its white tent
that served as a community center, Renaissance
Village reeked of impermanence, though for many
young children who lived there it was almost
the only home they had known.

Since the park closed, Adrian Love and her
father, Alton, have moved into a Baton Rouge
apartment (her mother, a crack user, lives in
New Orleans). Mr. Love, who has not been able
to hold a job since the storm, does not allow
Adrian, 9, to play outside much, instead
writing out long-division problems for her in a
notebook after dinner.

On Adrian’s first report card this year, she
got straight A’s. But she sees her friends from
Renaissance Village only rarely. “I wish I
still lived there,” she said.

Despite her wistfulness, Adrian projects a
poise that makes her seem resilient.

Children who had no serious problems before the
storm are likely to recover well, said Toni
Bankston, who until recently was the director
of mental health at the Baton Rouge Children’s
Health Project. But, she estimated, only about
60 percent fall into that category.

Ms. Bankston has particularly grave concerns
about the children who have fallen so far
behind in school that there is little chance of
their catching up. “What you’re looking at is
our future juvenile justice, our prison
population,” she said.

In October, Jermaine Howard returned to Baton
Rouge and moved into the one-bedroom apartment
occupied by his father, brother and
grandmother. With the help of Sister Judith
Brun, a nun who has been working with evacuees
since the storm, he enrolled in ninth grade at
Broadmoor High School.

That process alone provided a snapshot of the
chaos of Jermaine’s life. From several plastic
baggies and a dented metal canister, the family
could barely amass the documents needed to
prove his address.

School administrators balked when they
discovered that he had previously been
registered under his father’s last name,
Griffin, not the name on his birth certificate.
Jermaine, with tears in his eyes, was forced to
explain that his mother was in prison. He was
told to pay a visit to the ominous-sounding
Board of Hearings. Then came the kicker:
because he had already missed so much, he would
receive no credit for this semester.

“Nice to see y’all,” the school guidance
counselor said by way of welcome. “Just too bad
it wasn’t about three months ago.”

— Shaila Dewan
New York Times
2008-11-05


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