Last Black History Month I mentioned in this post my connection to the Bishop Perry Middle School in New Orleans. Well, of course my thoughts turned to the boys and teachers of the school during and immediately following Hurricane Katrina, but the web site was down and other information was difficult to come by. But I recently tried again and discovered that the school has reopened. I found this in the New Orleans Clarion Herald:
At Bishop Perry Middle School – a tuition-free Catholic middle school in the French Quarter operated by the Society of St. Edmund – the stories came flooding out during a Jan. 3 welcome-back assembly in the cafeteria....Ken Ducote, who had just become president of Bishop Perry two months before Katrina, said the Dauphine Street school sustained some water damage that required the cafeteria and computer lab floors to be replaced. The job was finally completed after the Christmas holidays. “It was really quiet being inside a school during Christmas time and having no students or Christmas pageants or other regular activities,” Ducote said. “When I drove in every day, the birds weren’t even singing. You didn’t hear the normal noise of children. But today is a sign of life. This is therapeutic.”
And you gotta love the resilience of children, like this young man:
...Seventh-grader Ke’Juan Carmouche,12, said his months in Texarkana, Ark,. made him appreciate his former life in New Orleans. “They didn’t have any sidewalks,” he said, smiling. “You would go to school, go home, do your work, eat and then go to sleep. We tried to make gumbo, but we didn’t have the right type of sausage. But it was a new learning experience. I like getting back into a good school where you get a chance to do a lot of things. This is a small learning environment, so you have more help.”
Meanwhile, as most of us in colleges and universities dive into our second semester, students from all over the affected hurricane areas are returning to school for their first semester. In case you missed it, hear a first-hand account about the return of the Xavier University community here. And keep in touch with these two developing "digital history" projects: (1) from the Tulane University community: a memorial website called Katrina Stories, and (2) the Hurrican Digital Memory Bank from The Center for History and New Media (CHNM) at George Mason, the University of New Orleans, the Smithsonian Institution's National Museum of American History, and other sponsors.
Posted by perry032 at January 28, 2006 06:30 PM