A Slow Hope: Time, hard work will rebuild New Orleans

On Aug. 29, 2006, the Dazets' Lakeview, New Orleans house was an anomaly - many others unlike houses which remain damaged a contractor was working on the day marking the one year anniversary of Hurricane Katrina.

Their one-story ranch that suffered eight feet of water had been razed in late 2005. Rising among the rubble that remained on street in January 2006, only blocks away from the site of the 17th Street Canal breach, was a house unlike many others on the street, elevated on eight-foot concrete piles.

A year later, the Dazets now call it home. The five-member family moved back in January.

"We're back; this is home," Maria Dazet said. "My whole family lives in Lakeview. I grew up in Lakeview."

Standing in the open area under their living room weeks from the two-year anniversary of Katrina, the Dazets chatter with ease about the pace of recovery and their own story.

Maria Dazet fought to get assistance from the Road Home program and won. Her three children have returned to school. They belong to a successful neighborhood association. And they've accepted the pace of recovery.

"Initially in the process we had thought it's clearly beyond comingback from an evacuation now," said her husband Dan Dazet, a University alumnus. "We've come to realize that you cannot expect that it's going to be back the way it was."

"I don't see it all being fixed in my lifetime," Maria Dazet said. "I plan on living a while."

The Dazet story is the type that University Public Administration Institute Director Jim Richardson thinks New Orleans needs so the city can continue the recovery effort.

Richardson has been studying the recovery of the New Orleans economy since Katrina, but his observations are more than numbers and statistics - they're about the spirit as well.

"It's going to take time," he said. "If we gave [everyone in New Orleans] money right now, it will not go much more rapidly.

"I'm not sure there's any one thing that you can say that 'this is what we need to do.' The real element is you have to maintain that sense of 'this is going to happen,' so people do not lose faith or hope in their neighborhoods. They need to have success stories that they can build on each other."

As the city and surrounding area continue to move on the track to recovery, a process Richardson projects will take at least a decade, New Orleans marks another milestone today. And as the nation turns its eyes to the city for a progress report, University researchers continue their role in the planning and processes involved.

From coastal restoration to education, University professors have their hands in every element of the city. They also have a front row seat while maintaining an outside perspective of recovery.

EDUCATION

Vanessa Rogers lived in the Lower 9th Ward before her family evacuated and lived "a hundred places" after Katrina. She and her seven children moved back to New Orleans and are rebuilding their home. Her house was a safe haven in the immediate aftermath of Katrina, she said. It saved two families' lives as neighbors climbed on her roof to wait for rescue.

Now she volunteers at the Common Grounds center in the Lower 9th, a center fueling recovery in the most devastated area.

"We know a lot people that went through a lot of stuff," she said. "That's why I'm here volunteering now because I know a lot of people helped me out, so I come here to help out when I can."

But it's her children who have faced the most difficult recovery.

"I have a little girl that's nine, and every time she sees stuff that she had, she says well 'Oh well, I'm not dead. Thank God I'm not dead,'" Rogers said.

Jayne Fleener, dean of the College of Education, works with children like Rogers' daughter every day. The education college works with recovery planning in New Orleans and at the Renaissance Village in Baker, a FEMA trailer park that remains the home of many displaced residents.

"[After Katrina] the first noticeable difference when you drove to New Orleans was there were no kids in the streets," Fleener said. "It's nice when you go to New Orleans now - you see children, you see families."

New Orleans has proven to be a case study in school choice, Fleener said.

"The waters have washed away more than people's homes," she said. "Not only the facilities. It washed away some of the ideas about how education is done in New Orleans."

Three school systems are operating in New Orleans. This year there is the state-run Recovery School District, the school board-run Orleans Parish schools and the Algiers Charter Schools Association that receives charters from the two other entities but operates independently.

Parents can send their children to any of the school systems and can opt for particular schools within each. But the options that didn't exist before Katrina have proven to be confusing for some.

Finding a school and then understanding transportation has confounded some parents, Fleener said. But parents can choose between neighborhood traditional-model schools, programs that offer concentrations like the Algiers Technology Academy and education alternatives like the night school run by the school board.

School choice has been popular in other parts of the country, and the rebuilding of an entire school system, from the buildings to the curriculum, has allowed the model to be tested on a large scale.

The reorganization of schools includes the reconstruction of the buildings.

Many of the buildings were in bad condition before the storm and are being rebuilt in a condition more conducive to education, Fleener said.

And since the first anniversary of Katrina, the school system in New Orleans has come under new command. Paul Vallas left Chicago, took the reins of the RSD - the largest chunk of public schools, and attorney Paul Pastorek was named the state Superintendent of Education.