Gulf Coast Sites Steadily Rebuilding

By: Ann Dobie
Publication: The Voice, Vol. 11, No. 2
Date: 2006

Summary: In the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina in Louisiana and Mississippi, with their facilities damaged and their members scattered across the country, members of three writing project sites revive their communities and their programs—and use writing in the healing process.

When Hurricane Katrina hit Mississippi and Louisiana on August 29, 2005, the destruction was vast. It swept away whole communities that are yet to begin rebuilding. St. Bernard Parish still has no school. There has not been a jury trial in New Orleans since the storm. Families that had lived in one place for generations are now scattered across the country. Every social institution and every person in those states was touched and changed by Katrina, including three sites of the National Writing Project: the Greater New Orleans Writing Project, the Southeastern Louisiana Writing Project, and the Live Oak Writing Project in Mississippi.

Greater New Orleans Writing Project

Ken Rayes had just become the new site director of the Greater New Orleans Writing Project (GNOWP) when Katrina hit. His predecessor, Jane Haspel, had mentored him over the preceding year, and he was ready to pick up her good work and go forward. Then Katrina intervened and the levees broke, inundating large portions of the city, particularly the Lakeside area where the University of New Orleans and GNOP are located. Ken and his family evacuated to Delaware, Jane moved to Denton, Texas, and teacher-consultants found new homes across the country. At that point there was no Greater New Orleans Writing Project.

It was no surprise, then, that on his return Ken was called upon to defend GNOWP against possible closure.

When the University of New Orleans reopened on a limited basis for the spring semester, it was a different institution. Students and faculty members had been displaced; the state budget had been cut; damage had been inflicted on facilities; and enrollment had dropped dramatically, with a consequent direct revenue loss. It was no surprise, then, that on his return Ken was called upon to defend GNOWP against possible closure. He made his arguments, pointing out the site's ability to serve as a liaison between the university and area schools, its positive impact on classroom practice, and its potential to improve literacy in a city that ranks near the bottom of most assessments of education. GNOWP survived, while programs all around it were cut.

Once he was back in business, Ken began work to revive the basic elements of the site, specifically the summer institute and inservice programs. Continuity would take some doing, since nobody knew where anybody else was. Nevertheless, in April three representatives from GNOWP attended the NWP Spring Meeting in Washington, D.C., where they met with other teacher-consultants and site directors as well as with their state's congressional representatives and senators. It was a good opportunity to tell the Louisiana education story to people who could actually help. The New Orleans contingent explained that a strong, stable school system must be in place if people are to return to the city; directors and teacher-consultants from the other four Louisiana sites pointed to the strained resources of the parishes that had absorbed the thousands of displaced students. Together they described how the needs of Louisiana schools and teachers have intensified as a result of Katrina and Rita. They asked for help.

The summer institute demanded attention next. Even with the vastly reduced number of teachers now in the New Orleans area, GNOWP found seven talented and diverse fellows for its 2006 invitational institute: There were two young teachers in their twenties and two older teachers who had taught for about 18 years each. There were an ESL teacher and a drama teacher. Two teachers were from private schools, one from a Catholic school, and the others from public schools; several taught underprivileged children. All promise to be valuable assets to the writing project.

Early in the summer the site reached out to area teachers by offering a three-day open seminar led by Dr. Deborah Alvarez from the University of Delaware. Entitled "Writing Katrina in the Classroom," the workshop was based on her doctoral and continuing research on the role of writing in dealing with trauma. The seminar was received with enthusiasm; eleven teachers (from pre-K to college level) attended and continued to participate in the seminar blog. In response to publicity efforts, GNOWP received donations to help defray costs from NWP sites in Nebraska and Philadelphia and from the National Writing Project.

An additional special project for the summer was a one-week seminar called "Effective Teaching Methods," held in late July at the University's Jefferson Center and directed by Ms. Cynthia Oei, a nationally known teacher from the UCLA Writing Project. Sixteen teachers participated with costs underwritten by the Jefferson Parish Department of Education and funding from the National Writing Project. The seminar was also open to GNOWP's teacher-consultants so that the site could offer it later as a workshop for teachers in local schools. Scheduling the seminar was a clear signal that it is once more "business as usual" for the Greater New Orleans Writing Project. At last it had announced a traditional professional development session that was not dealing with trauma, destruction, and hopelessness.

Personally I have been most impressed with the power of the National Writing Project as a community.

Despite these major steps to return the site to its previous strength, not everything has been a success. Not surprisingly, for example, the summer writing camps did not get enough participants to take place. Families just returning to the city needed their children with them to help with their rebuilding efforts, and those who had already moved back needed to get away from the rubble to renew and refresh their spirits. And, of course, the weakened economy made it impossible for many to afford any summer camp this year. The new school system is characterized by charter schools—new schools with their own resources that sprang up when the Orleans Parish school system's infrastructure was smashed and its employees scattered. So there are new challenges: Who is making the decisions about inservice work? Where are they? What do their faculties need? Finding the right people and offering the appropriate services is a long and time-consuming process, but the effort is beginning to pay off. At least four schools and school districts have contracted for GNOWP staff development. At the same time, the teacher-consultants are slowly returning to New Orleans and finding their way back into the GNOWP community, where they can again serve as inservice providers.

Despite the frustrations, Ken Rayes is optimistic. He says, "Personally I have been most impressed with the power of the National Writing Project as a community. Although we have lost many teacher-consultants to other states and other sites, those that we have remaining with us all talk about the community they are a part of. They tell of returning to the area after the storm to find the teachers at their schools scattered, so they first reached out to get in contact with friends from the Greater New Orleans Writing Project."

Southeastern Louisiana Writing Project

Katrina also made itself felt in Hammond, Louisiana, home of the Southeastern Louisiana Writing Project (SLWP). There were no levees to break, but the winds and rain took their toll, felling trees and power lines, leaving roofs stripped bare and yards littered with sticks and brush. The teachers there, too, were scattered far and wide, many of them not returning to their schools until October. At the writing project site, almost everything was put on hold. The leadership team had to postpone its September visioning retreat, the October Showcase of Best Practices (where new teacher-consultants give their demonstrations for local teachers) was cancelled, and the summer institute anthologies would have to be printed later.

The event took on an air of celebration as friends from across the state gathered to write and to heal. We had survived.

In the face of cancellations and postponements, however, SLWP took the initiative to address the aftermath of the storm as well as to maintain continuity. Returning to her freshman composition class eight days after Katrina, Joan Anderson had her students write to their German pen pals about their experiences. Their online descriptions were so impressive that site director Richard Louth decided to provide a forum for students and teachers to write about the hurricane. Using its listserv, SLWP distributed prompts to teacher-consultants and invited them to submit their poems and stories to a blog with the possibility of their being considered for inclusion on a radio show and in an anthology. "The number, diversity, and quality of the submissions was so impressive," Richard said, "that I decided we should put them together in what became Katrina: In Their Own Words a few weeks later." The radio program was aired locally in January, with other NWP sites invited to listen by Internet on a "live feed." With the help of NWP, the site now plans to publish an anthology of student and teacher writing based on the blog and radio show.

SLWP also undertook some continuity and inservice initiatives. A "Return to New Orleans" writing marathon in January attracted 25 teacher-consultants to the city, and they were joined electronically by 20 NWP writers participating in the first virtual writing marathon. SLWP also conducted its first Comprehensive School Reform inservice series in the spring, another sign of the site's renewed vitality

While recruiting for the summer institutes was difficult, the site managed to hold both an advanced institute—"The Art of Teaching and the Art of Writing," which included a three-day New Orleans writing marathon—and an invitational summer institute. The opening day of the advanced institute was a special one, as teacher-consultants from the other four Louisiana sites were invited to participate in a workshop led by Kim Stafford. The event took on an air of celebration as friends from across the state gathered to write and to heal. We had survived. Now we would do what we know how to do: deal with our memories through writing together.

Live Oak Writing Project

Farther east, in Mississippi, Live Oak Writing Project faced many of the same problems as those found in New Orleans and Hammond. Homes were gone, schools destroyed, and rubble lay everywhere. Realizing early on that they could not offer a summer institute in 2006 and that staff development would be impossible, site director Elaine White and the teacher-consultants she was able to find decided to use the year to look critically at their work and remake themselves by discarding programs and projects that were no longer valuable and focusing on development of those that had promise.

The biggest challenge was to find everyone. New addresses and changed telephone numbers led Elaine to compare the site's roster to a "huge, rolling wave, constantly moving and changing." Since telephoning seems to be the most efficient way of contacting people, site leaders are now creating a telephone tree to compile the numbers of those who have working phones.

Once the teacher-consultants could be found and reunited, the entire Teacher-Consultant Council came together at a jump-start retreat to discuss their strengths and note areas that were in need of attention. The result was a strategic plan that included both short-term and long-term goals. Most immediately, the council identified three projects to focus on as a way to rebuild the site. One was a scoring conference to be led by Paul Le Mahieu and Sherry Swain for teacher-consultants from Live Oak Writing Project and the South Mississippi Writing Project. As a second project, the team members from Journey to Horn Island and Beyond decided to write the first draft of a book based on their work. And for the third, the site members are focusing on incorporating more technology into their work.

State Networks

Throughout the recovery period, state networks played a new role. Kim Patterson, director of the Mississippi Writing/Thinking Institute state network comments on how the Live Oak Writing Project "pulled itself up by its bootstraps," and how the state network was able to assist in this resurgence. "There were teachers, many of whom had nothing save a FEMA trailer, making plans for going to Washington D.C. for the NWP Spring Meeting. Our state network paid for two of the four teachers who wished to attend."

The Louisiana Writing Projects Network had to put most of its annual projects on hold. The New Orleans Writing Marathon escaped cancellation because it preceded Katrina's arrival, but Louisiana Writes! (a statewide student writing contest) would not make its awards until five months after the originally scheduled date, and the Children's Writing Tent at the Louisiana Festival of the Book was simply cancelled. Those of us who were trying to hold things together shifted the network's focus to dealing with our community's wounds by reaching out to the new children in our schools and the new people in our towns. We asked for help from other NWP sites, and it rolled in quickly and abundantly. Our colleagues in the National Writing Project responded with incredible generosity, and their gifts not only supported our work with displaced students, but supported our spirits as well. And finally, we wrote, for ourselves and to each other. When we came together for the Kim Stafford workshop in early summer of 2006, still writing, we knew we had rounded a corner. We were ready to get back to work.