Schools share cost of Katrina

In August, Angelé Waddell taught at a small school in New Orleans and had no interest in relocating. Eleanor West, principal of an elementary school in Fulton County, didn't need to worry about children traumatized by a natural disaster.

Hurricane Katrina changed all that.

Looking for stability, Waddell three months ago accepted a full-time job at Harriet Tubman Elementary School in College Park. She tutors 19 children, many of whom also left behind homes and family members in Louisiana.

"Everything's different," Waddell said. "It's stressful. I know, because it's stressful for me."

Across Georgia, schools opened their doors to students who arrived en masse after the hurricane. Many hired teachers, added counseling staff, space and extra supplies.

So far, the costs have been borne locally. But over the next several weeks, schools expect to recoup some of their expenses through a $645 million federal aid package. The reimbursement could restore millions of dollars to local school systems that absorbed waves of displaced students.

The feds have promised up to $6,000 for each child in a regular classroom and up to $7,500 for each one in special education. The Georgia Department of Education last week collected student counts from each school system.

Private schools that took in displaced students also will get reimbursed, with their aid capped at the same amount as public schools. And the public school systems will disburse the money.

For systems such as Fulton's, the paperwork this entails was a welcome burden, because the system expects to receive as much as $3 million for the students it taught during the first semester.

"If we weren't getting this, we'd be behind the eight ball," said Mike Russell, the system's chief financial officer. Fulton, which still has about 1,000 Katrina students, hired more than 30 teachers to help with the unexpected surge. In October, the school board took $4 million from its reserves to cover its immediate needs.

Halfway through the school year, Georgia typically gives school systems a budget boost that recognizes growth in student enrollment. But state officials already had told school systems they can't include the Katrina children in those numbers.

If the children remain in the next school year, they will be counted as any other children and covered by state revenues, said Dana Tofig, a spokesman for the Department of Education.

Hurricane Katrina hit just east of New Orleans on Aug. 29, uprooting an estimated 372,000 schoolchildren. Within days, children started arriving in metro Atlanta schools.

By October, when the number of evacuees crested, Georgia had 10,613 Katrina students attending public and private schools. State education officials estimate that 113 of the state's 181 local school systems accepted such students.

Most took in fewer than 10 students. But several, including five large systems in metro Atlanta, each had more than 1,000 children from the Gulf Coast region.

The federal money will be distributed quarterly to schools, based on enrollments of student evacuees on selected dates in October, December, February and April. If enrollments decline, schools won't receive the full reimbursement.

While that may penalize schools that hired full-time staff members when the children arrived, Congress wanted the money to follow the children through what will probably be a year of transitions.

"We want to be as fair as possible," said Chad Colby, a spokesman for the U.S. Department of Education. "We're doing this out of fairness to the districts that are actually educating the students at the time."

Several Georgia colleges and universities also will get federal aid for taking in displaced students. Seven public and private institutions will share $293,868. The largest portion goes to Georgia State University, which had almost 500 evacuees taking classes last semester. It charged them only a $100 fee.

In the public schools, children often arrived with little documentation. Encouraged by state officials, schools accepted children and assigned them to classes based on age. In some cases, students were scattered among grade levels and had little impact on the school's bottom line. In other cases, schools had to create new classes or add staffers.

West, the Tubman principal, initially received 26 evacuees. When told that she could add another teacher, she created a position for someone to work with students to help them adjust, as well as with academic tutoring.

"These kids were dealing with a lot of trauma, based upon what they had just experienced," West said. "Some of the trauma had caused them to kind of withdraw. We knew we wanted them to have extra support."

The effort seems to have paid off, West said, in part because Waddell understands what the children lost. "It gave them a sense of, 'OK, someone here has gone through the same thing.' "