Ed. Dept. Web Site Is Matchmaker for Hurricane Aid
Last week, Kevin L. O’Rourke was sitting atop a pile of discarded school desks in an old machine shed in Minnesota. By this week, those 2,000 desks were slated to be in classrooms in Plaquemines Parish, La., where the school district’s own furniture was washed away by Hurricane Katrina.
Mr. O’Rourke heads Magnus West, an Inver Grove Heights, Minn., nonprofit organization that usually collects old school desks and textbooks and routes them to developing countries. This time, he’s sending a care package to Gulf Coast schools, and a fleet hired by the Department of Transportation is trucking it there.
The link between Mr. O’Rourke and the Plaquemines Parish district is one of 530 such connections made so far through a special Web site of the federal Department of Education called Hurricane Help for Schools. The site acts as a matchmaker for donors who want to help hurricane-affected schools or those that have taken in students displaced...
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