Report Says Education Problems Linger After Katrina

JACKSON, Miss. (AP) _ A report detailing serious public education problems along the Gulf Coast two years after Hurricane Katrina can serve as a tool for Congress as it attempts to speed the region's

Wednesday, August 29th 2007, 8:43 am

By: News On 6

JACKSON, Miss. (AP) _ A report detailing serious public education problems along the Gulf Coast two years after Hurricane Katrina can serve as a tool for Congress as it attempts to speed the region's recovery, a key congressman said.

Thousands of displaced students and millions of dollars in unfunded school reconstruction projects still plague the coast, according to the report released Wednesday by the Atlanta-based Southern Education Foundation.

The report urged the federal government to adopt a ``new response'' to restore struggling educational institutions.

``It means doing a full assessment of what the childcare centers, preschools and K-12 schools need to restore themselves. That's a lot different from throwing a few million dollars into a bill as it's going through the hopper,'' said Steve Suitts, the foundation's program director and author of the report.

House Majority Whip James Clyburn said there are ``vast and overwhelming'' complexities associated with restoring the coast's public education system.

Clyburn, D-S.C., toured the Gulf Coast this month as part of a delegation led by House Speaker Nancy Pelosi. He also visited the region last year.

``I have seen firsthand that the post-hurricane response to rebuilding the public education infrastructure in the Gulf Coast has been inadequate and improvements must be made,'' Clyburn wrote Tuesday in an e-mail to The Associated Press.

``Therefore, I believe that the Southern Education Foundation's report will serve as an important tool to Congress as we further our efforts to reconstruct schools in the Gulf Coast region,'' he wrote.

The report, billed as the first overall, independent assessment of education along the Gulf Coast since the storm, said only 2 percent of the federal government's hurricane-related funding went toward education recovery.

Other findings in the report:

_ The costs of hurricane destruction in K-12 and higher education were approximately $6.2 billion, but only $1.2 billion in federal funding had been committed to restoring physical structures and property.

_ Displaced students re-enrolled in schools in 49 states, but a lack of adequate federal funding meant that schools with the greatest number of displaced students had insufficient classrooms, staff and supplies to support them.

_ Nearly one out of every six students in Louisiana's public colleges and universities dropped out for the 2005-06 school year. In the 2006-07 school year, more than 26,000 students from Louisiana public colleges and almost 9,000 Mississippi college students remained out of school.

Suitts said the foundation's report analyzed government data, school records and private surveys to estimate the scale of damage and displacement after Katrina struck the Gulf Coast on Aug. 29, 2005.

Education officials in Mississippi and Louisiana said they were encouraged by the progress made within the public school systems.

Mississippi Education Superintendent Hank Bounds said K-12 enrollment in the six coastal counties was at nearly 93 percent. Bounds said that while reconstruction of some buildings has been slow, ``given everything that has taken place, I think that the schools are doing remarkably well.''

Mississippi's schools received $300 million in restart funds from the federal government, he said.

The state's higher education system along the coast also appears to be rebounding. Classes have resumed at the University of Southern Mississippi's Gulf Park campus, which sustained extensive damage, and enrollment is near where it was before the storm, said Robert Bass, project director of Gulf Coast operations for the state College Board.

Louisiana created incentive programs to encourage students to return to school, said Kevin Hardy, a Board of Regents spokesman. The most recent came during the summer legislative session when Louisiana lawmakers approved the Go Grant, a need-based college aid program that would award up to $2,000 to full-time students.

``We're still down some 20,000 students in our public colleges and universities,'' Hardy said. ``The Go Grant was initiated to get enrollment up and target those who are most in need of an opportunity for access.''