‘The Hurricane Messed a Lot of Us Up’
Settling back in to school has been a struggle for thousands of New Orleans students whose lives were disrupted by Katrina.
There had been so much upheaval in Giovanna Batiste’s life after Hurricane Katrina. Evacuation. Separation from family. Her mother without a job. A drowned home, pushed off its foundation. Her school shuttered indefinitely. And deep uncertainty about whether she would ever come home to New Orleans.
But Giovanna, 16, found something unexpected amid all that disruption: a high school that was, in her words, orderly. “It was easier for me to learn there,” she said.
Now, after more than two years of living and going to school in Houston, Giovanna and her mother have come home to this city’s Lower Ninth Ward and are living, temporarily, in her grandmother’s rebuilt house. Since October, Giovanna, a junior, has been attending Frederick Douglass High School, where, almost daily, at least one of her classes is...
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