Education
March 1, 2007
As President Bush heads to New Orleans today to tour a school and talk about education, House Democrats are preparing to unveil legislation that would pour $250 million into the city's hurricane-ravaged school system over the next five years. The Democrats' plan, details of which were provided to The Times-Picayune late Wednesday, would grant financial incentives to teachers and principals to stay in or move to New Orleans. It also would pay $500-per-month housing subsidies and authorize as much as $500 million in grants to universities and colleges closed by flooding after Hurricane Katrina in 2005.
February 26, 2007
Thousands of New Orleans college students who received disaster assistance after Hurricane Katrina received letters later from the Federal Emergency Management Agency demanding repayment, reports The Times-Picayune. Federal law says that anyone incurring a "disaster-related" expense is eligible for assistance, regardless of whether he is a resident of the state where the disaster struck. But FEMA says things aren't so clear-cut when it comes to college students whose primary residence is often their parents' house.
January 24, 2007
New Orleans universities — including those in the Louisiana State University and Southern University systems — are under fire in a new report alleging too many faculty and degrees were eliminated without due process after Hurricane Katrina, reports The (Baton Rouge) Advocate. Accusations range from rushed administrative decisions to vindictive targeting of faculty members. The charges are part of a draft report from the American Association of University Professors.
December 15, 2006
Hundreds of college students from all over the country are expected to descend on the Gulf Coast in January to witness firsthand the ravages of Hurricane Katrina and try to do something about it, according to The (Biloxi) Sun Herald. From Jan. 14-20, students will participate in "Louisiana Winter" to help remind the rest of the nation about the social and emotional impact of Hurricane Katrina on Mississippi and the Bayou State. Students also will work to garner support for the Gulf Coast Civics Work Project, federal legislation that will provide resources to hire 100,000 Gulf Coast residents to rebuild Mississippi and Louisiana.
December 4, 2006
Stronger levees, better schools and increased access to health care must be the top priorities as New Orleans rebuilds, a group of more than 2,500 Crescent City natives has told city and national leaders. Connected by satellite and the Internet, Hurricane Katrina survivors in 21 U.S. cities mulled over their priorities during an eight-hour Unified New Orleans Plan workshop Saturday, according to the Houston Chronicle. Their thoughts on how to improve utilities, housing, education, flood protection and emergency services in New Orleans will be included in the final recovery plan, which is expected to be submitted to the city's leaders in January.
November 30, 2006
Thousands of Louisiana public-school students are at risk for years of academic problems because they were uprooted by hurricanes Katrina and Rita, a report issued Wednesday says. The (Baton Rouge) Advocate reports that according to the report, the storms displaced nearly 200,000 students last year — the largest such upheaval in U. S. education history. More than one-fourth of the students in Louisiana's public schools had to flee because of the devastation. They relocated to every parish in Louisiana and to 48 other states. About 40,000 students missed more than seven weeks of the last school year, according to Student Displacement in Louisiana After the Hurricanes of 2005: Experiences of Public Schools and Their Students, a 133-page report by the education division of the Washington-based RAND Corp.research group.
November 17, 2006
As part of its series profiling the Hurricanes football team of South Plaquemines High, a school created for displaced students after Katrina, The New York Times reports on its come-from-behind victory in the playoffs. Fourteen months earlier, Hurricane Katrina had destroyed the players' homes, their possessions, their former schools and their football seasons. The fact they are even playing is a testament to the resiliency of its students and supporters from the state's hurricane-shattered communities of Port Sulphur, Buras and Boothville-Venice in lower Plaquemines Parish.
November 14, 2006
Dillard University in New Orleans is receiving $2 million from the federal government to rebuild off-campus housing damaged by Hurricane Katrina, according to The Associated Press. The grant announced Monday by the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development comes under a program meant to help historically black colleges and universities, such as Dillard, further address the needs of their communities. Katrina left the private school's campus under up to 8 feet of water, some of which stayed in buildings for several weeks, said Karen Celestan, Dillard's senior director for university communications. Since the storm, just one of Dillard's dorms has re-opened, and it has limited space for co-eds, she said.
October 24, 2006
Early Friday afternoon in Port Sulphur, La., Highway 23 was shut down for a stretch of two and a half miles by the wail of sirens and flashing lights, for a parade celebrating the first football game played in the lower end of Plaquemines Parish since Hurricane Katrina, The New York Times reports. "We need this like New Orleans needs Mardi Gras," Stanley Gaudet, the principal at South Plaquemines High, said. Homecoming was meant to celebrate the resilience of not one devastated town but three — Port Sulphur, Buras and Boothville-Venice.
October 20, 2006
New Orleans, notorious for having one of the worst public school systems in the country, has emerged from the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina as an experiment in education: Privately run charter schools, relatively limited before last year's storm, now outnumber government-run public schools, reports The Associated Press. And the numbers could rise as the demand for quality schools grows in this still-recovering city, state education officials predict.
October 13, 2006
A judge in New Orleans has ordered three insurance companies to reinstate their policies covering Dillard University, which was badly damaged in Hurricane Katrina 13 months ago, reports The Chronicle of Higher Education. Two of the companies had canceled their flood-insurance coverage for the institution following the storm and the third had reduced its flood coverage from $50 million to $10 million. The university sued the companies this past summer, arguing that the reductions in coverage violated an emergency order issued by the Louisiana Department of Insurance. The judge's order, which stands for the duration of the legal proceedings, prohibits insurers from canceling or not renewing policies on property that had been damaged in the hurricane.
See Chronicle of Higher Education article
September 8, 2006
Houston may be hot, unfriendly and frustratingly difficult to navigate, but more than two-thirds of the poorest New Orleans evacuees who fled to the city after Hurricane Katrina plan to stay, a Rice University survey released today shows. Almost 69 percent of the 1,081 people queried in the National Science Foundation-funded study conducted in July by political science professors Rick Wilson and Robert Stein said they likely will remain in Houston, according to the Houston Chronicle. Wilson and Stein say their findings reflect the view of 35,000 to 40,000 evacuees, about one-fourth of the displaced New Orleanians thought to be living in the city.
August 25, 2006
One in four Houston Independent School District students displaced by Hurricane Katrina failed to make enough academic progress to be promoted to the next grade this school year — a far higher rate than their classmates and an indicator of the massive challenges still facing area schools. The Houston Chronicle reports that about 700 of the 2,900 Katrina students returning to district schools this year were held back, including 41 percent of high school sophomores and 52 percent of juniors. That 24 percent retention rate was among the highest in the area, according to retention rates released by some local school systems.
August 21, 2006
For parents throughout New Orleans, the first post-storm back-to-school season is having an inauspicious start. But it is perhaps most chaotic for those relying on a new state effort to rescue dozens of city schools that were a disaster even before Hurricane Katrina, according to The New York Times. State officials said the storm offered one of the worst school districts in the nation an opportunity for rebirth in the Recovery School District. But staffing shortages and a late start to planning have hindered progress.
July 6, 2006
For St. Tammany Parish educators, Hurricane Katrina created a series of unprecedented disruptions, fracturing school communities, uprooting thousands of students and transplanting them in unfamiliar terrain. But the effects of such disruptions on the parish's students, test scores and accountability rankings remain largely unknown, according to The Times-Picayune. In an effort to shed light on the district's post-Katrina status, the St. Tammany Parish school system commissioned a study on hurricane-driven student mobility, in an attempt to identify those students and sectors that were most affected by the turbulent school year. An assessment of student demographic changes will also prove critical when considering state and federal accountability programs that hinge on test scores, particularly 2001's No Child Left Behind Act, said J.P. Beaudoin of Research in Action, the consulting company that conducted the study.
May 22, 2006
Many Houston students who are Katrina evacuees are failing the Texas competency tests, according to National Public Radio. Two-thirds of them failed the state math achievement test. They face being held back or going to summer school. The school system is getting about $16 million to pay for educating the Katrina evacuees, but that doesn't cover summer school costs.
Hear National Public Radio report
May 18, 2006
Adjusting to a new school is challenging for any student, but the 3,000 students from Louisiana in Houston’s Alief Independent School District had added stress placed on them because of the way they arrived following Hurricane Katrina. Alief schools are bigger and more diverse than the mostly black schools they previously attended, reports the Houston Chronicle. While the Houston and New Orleans students have come a long way during the year in terms of getting along with each other, the struggle is not over. In the beginning, the students from Louisiana had to contend with being called names, ridiculed for their accents and how they dress.
May 12, 2006
President Bush, on his 10th visit to Mississippi since Hurricane Katrina hit in August, told 1,460 graduates of Mississippi Gulf Coast Community College on Thursday that their perseverance was an inspiration, the Los Angeles Times reports. Almost a third of the school's 10,500 students dropped out, school officials said, and the homes of about 200 staff and faculty members were destroyed. But the college reopened 17 days after Katrina made landfall. When Bush arrived here Thursday, as the first president to give a commencement address at a community college, the damage from Katrina was still evident. Restoration efforts are continuing at Mississippi Coast Coliseum, gutted when winds and 5 feet of water destroyed its interior. But the building served as a proud venue for the ceremony, attended by 7,000 relatives and friends of the graduates.
May 4, 2006
School libraries wiped out by Katrina and Rita are getting grants worth $500,000 to help them rebuild, along with a rare magazine collection, first lady Laura Bush and media executives announced Wednesday. Bush, a former librarian and public school teacher, announced the grants at Chalmette High School in St. Bernard Parish, La., where every building — including 15 schools — was flooded. Seven public and private schools in Louisiana and three in Mississippi will receive the money from the Laura Bush Foundation's Gulf Coast Library Recovery Initiative, The Associated Press reports.
May 1, 2006
Eight months after Hurricane Katrina flattened the Gulf Coast region and displaced about 372,000 students, school officials say restrictions on how they can spend federal relief money are slowing down their efforts to rebuild and reopen schools, reports USA TODAY. A few lawmakers say the effort should be stripped from the Federal Emergency Management Agency altogether and handed to a proposed "education recovery czar" at the U.S. Education Department. In many cases, superintendents have started rebuilding efforts on their own, crossing their fingers that federal aid would follow.
April 26, 2006
Fifth-graders who were displaced by Hurricane Katrina are lagging even further behind in math than on reading, leaving some educators worried that hundreds of Texas' newest pupils could have to repeat the grade, reports the Houston Chronicle. Only 45 percent of the 2,396 evacuee fifth-graders who took the math Texas Assessment of Knowledge and Skills this month passed, compared with 82 percent of the Texas students, according to statewide results released Tuesday by the Texas Education Agency. Last month, 47 percent of the Louisiana students enrolled in Texas passed the reading test, compared with an overall passing rate of 80 percent.
April 20, 2006
Seven months after two powerful hurricanes blew through the Gulf Coast, many elected officials, law enforcement agencies and residents say Texas is nearing the end of its ability to play good neighbor without compensation, The New York Times reports. Houston's municipal seams are straining due to the area's 150,000 new residents from New Orleans, officials say. Crime was already on the rise there before the hurricane, but police say that evacuees were victims or suspects in two-thirds of the 30 percent increase in murders since September. The public schools are also struggling to educate thousands of new students.
April 13, 2006
Hurricane Katrina destroyed most of their Mississippi school district, so students at Bay Saint Louis’ Second Street Elementary and four of the area’s other six schools have been going to class in trailers since November. Most families are still living in tents, trailers and cars while they try to rebuild their lives, according to a NewsHour Extra article based on a NewsHour with Jim Lehrer broadcast report. But even school in temporary classrooms in the shadow of damaged buildings has brought a sense of normalcy to many children — and their educators.
See NewsHour Extra article and original broadcast report
March 29, 2006
Starved for cash, the New Orleans school district is taking a long shot and hoping to sell its flooded, unsalvageable school buses on eBay, reports The Associated Press. Some submerged to their roofs in the black floodwaters, the yellow school buses were widely photographed in the days after Hurricane Katrina and have become an icon of the city's devastated school system.
March 24, 2006
As Barbara Bush spent two hours championing her son's software company at a Houston middle school Thursday morning, a watchdog group questioned whether the former first lady should be allowed to channel a donation to Neil Bush's company Ignite Learning through Houston's Hurricane Katrina relief fund. The Houston Chronicle reports that some critics said donations to a tax-deductible charitable fund shouldn't benefit the Bush family. Others questioned whether the Houston Independent School District violated district policy by allowing the company to host a promotional event on campus. School officials said the event at the middle school, where Bush met with 40 educators and business leaders, did not violate policy.
March 16, 2006
Amid the continuing debate over the role of women's education in American colleges, six Tulane University alumnae and nine students filed a lawsuit Wednesday seeking to block the school from dismantling a historic women's college as part of a sweeping restructuring plan launched after Hurricane Katrina. The Los Angeles Times reports that the lawsuit, filed in U.S. District Court in New Orleans, seeks an injunction blocking Tulane from closing its 120-year-old H. Sophie Newcomb Memorial College, one of the nation's first degree-granting colleges for women. The suit also seeks to bar the university from tinkering with Newcomb's endowment, which has been estimated at $40 million and is separate from Tulane's $745-million endowment.
March 13, 2006
Hurricane Katrina evacuees in the third and fifth grades had high failure rates on Texas reading tests taken last month, according to state education officials. The Houston Chronicle reports that 41 percent of third-graders and 53 percent of fifth-graders failed the Texas Assessment of Knowledge and Skills, putting them at risk of having to repeat the grade unless they pass on future attempts. The data may help Houston-area superintendents make their case for getting more federal funding for displaced students.
March 9, 2006
Texas now has nearly 40,000 displaced children from the New Orleans area, many of whom attended one of the worst public school systems in the nation, the Houston Chronicle reports. Long before Hurricane Katrina devastated New Orleans, the city’s public school system was plagued by corruption, financial mismanagement, high dropout rates and low test scores. Houston-area educators are scrambling to create programs, such as remedial reading classes and after-school tutoring, to make sure students perform well on Texas' tests. They've enlisted the help of everyone, including grandparents and academic specialists, to help close achievement gaps that in some cases are years wide.
March 6, 2006
When the Orleans Parish School Board gathered last month and voted to fire virtually the entire work force of 7,500 teachers, custodians, bus drivers and kitchen staff, union brass might have been expected to clamor loudly in opposition. Instead, but for one or two non-union gadflies who spieled and sat down, you could practically hear the crickets, The Times-Picayune reports. Katrina scattered thousands of teachers and school staff workers across the nation, destroying their homes and many of the schools at which they spent their careers. The union's death blow came in November, when the Legislature voted to sweep 87 percent of the system's schools into a state-run recovery district, annulling the collective bargaining agreement that for years had given United Teachers of New Orleans the exclusive right to negotiate most school employees' contracts with the School Board.
Six months after Katrina, only a small number of New Orleans schools has reopened so far, but many people see the storm's destruction as a unique opportunity to rebuild a system that had no place to go but up. The Associated Press reports that the system, regarded as one of the worst in America, had been rotting for decades: Buildings were neglected. Kids weren't learning. Millions of dollars were squandered or stolen.
March 3, 2006
Federal funding shortfalls and Texas' plan to use hurricane relief money to refill state coffers will leave Houston-area schools footing much of the bill for educating Hurricane Katrina evacuees, local elected officials said Thursday. The Houston Chronicle reports that the U.S. Department of Education cut the first installment of Hurricane Katrina relief in half to $750 per student because more than 158,000 displaced children were reported nationally — roughly 60,000 more than the $645 million federal appropriation can fully fund.
February 22, 2006
College students displaced by Hurricane Katrina are resilient and coping well, but many are experiencing moderate levels of depression, according to the preliminary findings of a study by Louisiana State University and University of Houston researchers. Researchers compared 68 displaced New Orleans-area students who enrolled at LSU after Hurricane Katrina with 68 students who were enrolled at LSU before the storm, the Houston Chronicle reports.
February 14, 2006
Houston-area schools have taken in nearly 20,000 evacuee children since Hurricane Katrina struck Aug. 29 and Hurricane Rita hit three weeks later. But the Houston Chronicle reports that no one can say how many families there are who, perhaps overwhelmed by their circumstances, are struggling with some basic needs while neglecting another one: education. Several managers of southwest Houston apartments with large evacuee populations told the Chronicle last week that they have seen numerous school-age children roaming the complexes during school hours.
February 10, 2006
The Archdiocese of New Orleans has announced plans to close 7 of its 142 parishes, temporarily merge about two dozen, and consolidate or change many of its 107 schools. Effective March 15, the plan will be re-evaluated in two years, when the future of New Orleans itself should be clearer, The New York Times reports. The history of the Roman Catholic Church is intimately entwined with that of the city, where two dozen streets are named after saints and St. Louis Cathedral has soared over Jackson Square for two centuries.
February 1, 2006
The floodwaters that followed Hurricane Katrina left New Orleans' colleges with an array of problems, but also an unprecedented and enormous opportunity. In nearly every academic field, from architecture to sociology to economics, the city's rebuilding offers a real-world educational laboratory the likes of which American universities have never seen, the Associated Press reports.
January 31, 2006
Fights between displaced students and their new classmates have frustrated districts in Texas and other states with large populations of Katrina refugees and have eclipsed the warm welcomes that schools insist are the norm. The Associated Press reports that in Houston, which absorbed about 6,000 student evacuees, district officials have reported at least a dozen violent incidents. The district reopened classes after the Christmas break with a 10 percent increase in campus security.
January 18, 2006
With New Orleans’ school system in tatters after Hurricane Katrina, a mayoral commission said on Tuesday that the city has a rare opportunity to build a fair and progressive education system, the Associated Press reports. Before Katrina, the New Orleans school system was one of the worst in the nation with very poor test scores, widespread fraud and a debilitating lack of resources.
January 13, 2006
After damage from Hurricane Katrina, floodwaters and price-gouging landlords forced students in New Orleans from their dorms and off-campus homes, colleges and universities promised to find them new housing if they promised to return to school. The Chicago Tribune reports that a cruise ship is just one of the more creative solutions to the housing problems facing colleges in New Orleans. Some students are living in hotels—in one case at a Hilton where they have 24-hour room service. Still other students and some faculty eventually may wind up living in trailer homes.
January 11, 2006
The commission devising a blueprint to reconstruct the city will propose on Wednesday a complete reorganization of the troubled school system, the elimination of a 76-mile shipping channel that was a prime cause of flooding after Hurricane Katrina and the creation of a new jazz district downtown, The New York Times reports. The commission report, several members said, will also advocate building a 53-mile light-rail system crisscrossing the city, connecting neighborhoods with the airport, downtown and other commercial centers. That system would be in addition to a separate heavy-rail system that would link New Orleans with Baton Rouge and the rest of the Gulf Coast.
January 10, 2006
More than 30,000 students will return to four-year colleges in New Orleans this semester after a fall term that wasn't. USA TODAY reports that classes began at Dillard and Loyola universities on Monday; other schools will follow later in the month. Total enrollment is down from 45,000 who were in New Orleans before the storm, but it is far more than school officials initially expected. And it represents a big bump for the city's depleted, post-Katrina population.
January 6, 2006
The Bush administration handed out the first hurricane relief payments to schools and colleges, awarding more than $250 million on Thursday to four Gulf Coast states as part of $1.6 billion in recovery aid. The Associated Press reports that the lump-sump payments include help for private schools that some critics have assailed as a national voucher experiment. The money went out one week after President Bush signed the legislation into law.
January 4, 2006
Hundreds of children returned Tuesday for the first time since Hurricane Katrina to schools in New Orleans that had survived on dry ground. Some came gleefully. Some came mournfully, and, to be sure, tens of thousands who were still displaced could not come at all, The New York Times reports. But for those who ventured back, the educational landscape was much different from the one they had left: New Orleans is now a smaller system dominated by new charter schools in the same buildings that housed traditional public schools before the storm, as well as by leaner private schools eager for what they hope will be new pools of aid.
December 22, 2005
A think tank has announced plans to create an institute to help the hurricane-devastated Gulf Coast by finding long-term solutions to issues such as flood control, housing, education and emergency response. The Associated Press reports that seven universities in Louisiana, Mississippi and Alabama are teaming with the California-based nonprofit RAND Corp. to conduct studies through the Gulf States Policy Institute. While many groups have attacked short-term problems from hurricanes Katrina and Rita, not enough attention has been given to long-term challenges, RAND President and CEO James A. Thomson said.
December 19, 2005
As part of a program to help Louisiana recover from Hurricane Katrina, the French government soon will allocate $431,000 to the state's schools, the local French consulate said this week. About $500,000 more will be held in reserve by a foundation acting on behalf of the government, The Times-Picayune reports. About $151,000 will go to three New Orleans schools with special French-language programs that have reopened or will reopen in the next few weeks. Another $280,000 will go to other Louisiana schools, on the basis of $100 per enrolled student. The consulate's announcement noted that France has been involved for many years with efforts to promote teaching of French in Louisiana schools.
December 15, 2005
Five New Orleans public schools that had been shut down since Hurricane Katrina hit reopened Wednesday as charter schools, run independently of a city school system that has long been criticized as bloated, inefficient and corrupt, according to the Associated Press. It was the latest development in what parents and education officials in Louisiana hope will be a disaster-inspired renaissance for public education in New Orleans, which was home to most of the state's worst schools before the hurricane shut down the entire system.
December 9, 2005
Despite attracting 85 percent of its Hurricane Katrina-scattered students back to campus in January, Tulane University on Thursday announced an unprecedented restructuring of one of the nation's most prestigious universities, including layoffs, cuts or consolidations in colleges and academic programs and the elimination of eight sports as the institution grapples with $200 million in storm-related losses. The Times-Picayune reports that about 230 faculty members will be laid off. Tulane also said it will reduce its clinical programs at the university's medical center as part of a forced adjustment to post-Katrina life in a smaller New Orleans.
December 8, 2005
Former Presidents George H.W. Bush and Bill Clinton, the unlikely duo that has proved to be a fund-raising colossus on behalf of disaster victims, announced yesterday they would give $90 million from their Hurricane Katrina relief fund to universities, faith-based groups and other rebuilding efforts along the devastated Gulf Coast, The Washington Post reports. Bush and Clinton, who were tapped in September by President George W. Bush to lead a fund-raising effort for hurricane victims, have raised $100 million in their Bush-Clinton Katrina Fund.
Mississippi’s Gov. Haley Barbour delivered an impassioned plea to a House select committee Wednesday, urging Congress to quickly pass Hurricane Katrina relief legislation, which has been stalled for months. The Republican says that delayed federal assistance is causing businesses to reconsider relocating away from Mississippi, which would hurt state employment, consumer spending and tax revenues, according to a Knight Ridder Newspapers report. Barbour told lawmakers that federal aid is urgently needed for 10,000 temporary housing units, to rebuild demolished roads and bridges, and to fund school districts overwhelmed by reconstruction costs.
See Knight Ridder Newspapers article
A brawl that began in the Westbury High School cafeteria Wednesday and spilled outdoors capped weeks of growing tension between local Houston students and transplanted Katrina evacuees, resulting in the arrest of 27 students. The Houston Chronicle reports that the fight was one of about a dozen such on-campus clashes that have roiled Houston and surrounding areas since thousands of students from New Orleans began attending local schools in September.
December 6, 2005
When Hurricane Katrina forced Tulane University to cancel its fall semester, about 13,000 students scattered to almost 600 colleges around the country. The Los Angeles Times says most host schools accepted no tuition and did not ask to see transcripts. The dispersal of Tulane's entire student body — along with 8,000 faculty members and other employees — presented a challenge almost as great as refurbishing the Louisiana school’s campus, university President Scott Cowen said.
November 28, 2005
An education movement that gives individual schools the power to hire teachers, set policy and write curriculum is gaining an unprecedented foothold in New Orleans. USA Today reports that in the three months since Hurricane Katrina hit, the city school board has approved 20 charter schools. The Louisiana Department of Education, which is taking over most of the city's public schools under legislation approved last week, is likely to establish more charter schools.
November 23, 2005
After making last-minute tweaks, Louisiana lawmakers have sent legislation with more than $600 million in state spending cuts to Gov. Kathleen Blanco for her signature, The (Baton Rouge) Advocate reports. The House bill is the state's solution for the nearly $1 billion hurricane-related shortfall in tax collections caused by Katrina and Rita. The biggest cuts, in health care and education, will likely cause thousands of state workers to be laid off and a reduction in the free prescription medication that the poor can receive.
$600 million cut from state budget
November 18, 2005
Louisiana's public colleges and universities announced millions of dollars in cuts on Thursday. Education officials said the cuts are necessary in the aftermath of Hurricanes Rita and Katrina, The Advocate (Baton Rouge) reports. Approximately 46,000 students who were enrolled in public colleges prior to the storms are not in school today. The universities are in turn taking a $67 million hit from uncollected tuition or tuition that has been reimbursed. All university systems will face cuts as a result, ranging from faculty and personnel layoffs to the elimination of programs.
http://2theadvocate.com/stories/111705/new_educationcuts001.shtml
November 16, 2005
Hurricane Katrina has delivered tens of thousands of new children to Texas public schools from evacuee families and many more Medicaid enrollees—making some state officials anxious about the federal government's willingness to absorb those costs in the future, the San Antonio Express-News reports. Texas' lieutenant governor says that he expects the federal government to reimburse all of the hurricane's related costs, but he is concerned about the future costs, which officials say would be about $550 million a year just for public education and Medicaid.
http://www.mysanantonio.com/news/metro/stories/MYSA111605.05B.Hurricanecost.11363196.html
November 15, 2005
Both houses of the Louisiana Legislature have voted to approve the governor's proposal that would shift responsibility for running most of New Orleans' schools to the state Department of Education, The Times-Picayune reports. Legislators have been increasingly unhappy in recent years with the city school system's poor academic performance and financial mismanagement. Some state officials say the closure of the city's public schools since Hurricane Katrina has given them an opportunity to make major changes.
Legislature OKs school takeover
November 1, 2005
Louisiana Gov. Kathleen Blanco issued wide-ranging 77-item call for a special legislative session in Baton Rouge to be held Nov. 6-22 to deal with hurricane-related problems, The Shreveport Times reports. "This is a substantial package of initiatives that will help our families, our businesses and our state recover from Katrina and Rita," Blanco said. "We will cut spending and restructure government to address a $1 billion drop in state revenues." The package includes legislation to rebuild the New Orleans school system, give tax breaks to citizens and businesses affected by the storms, create a new building code, build stronger levees, improve coastal protection and strengthen ethics laws so that elected officials and their families can't profit from recovery efforts.