In the wake of Katrina, the long-deficient New Orleans public school system is crying out for help, but not getting an answer. This winter 90% of the schools were taken out of the legendarily corrupt school board’s hands, leaving the board in control of the few schools that were performing above average before the storm. I hope that with a such a decreased salary they will not still be making the same salaries.

Since the Katrina, not a penny of federal aid has been put into the New Orleans school system, though millions of dollars have been promised. Last Friday the “Times Picayune”: http://www.nola.com/search/index.ssf?/base/news-13/114318372187520.xml?nola that that Republican Mike Castle, chairman of the U.S. House Subcommittee on Education Reform, just paid a visit to New Orleans and promised to do “whatever he can.” At this point it seems that anything would be helpful.

A friend who teaches at Charter Middle School says that her job has become incredibly difficult. Charter, which offers Mardi Gras Indian culture and African drumming as electives, held a lottery every fall. Parents competed to have their kids fill the much sought after seats in the building, located behind the Carrollton Shopping Center in Mid-City. Post-Katrina, the school has re-located to an uptown building. Rather than students competing to go there, the kids are sent to school according to location. Disciplinary problems, which rarely occurred before, have become more commonplace.

Many students have been traumatized. Sometimes they come up to the teacher dazed and don't know what's going on. The problem is, she says, I don’t know which kids are suffering from PTSD due to the storm, and which ones are suffering from PTSD due to poverty. Who needs immediate treatment and how do we help them? Charter is providing couseling services to the students and school staff have an ongoing discussion about how to deal with students’ problems in the classroom. Unfortunately, there is no "Teaching Traumatized Students 101."

The other problem is that the students’ homelife does not facilitate the healing process. Many are kids still don’t have a permanent home. “Imagine a fifteen year old living in a trailer with his grandmother,” says my friend. Maybe kids will really start enjoying school, because there’s not much else to do. Acting school Superintendent Ora Watson says she is going to begin working with Rev. William Maestri, superintendent of the Catholic school system, to place the more than 2,000 kids who are not in school. I hope some federal dollars (if they ever arrive) will be put into free summer programs.