Katrina kids find refuge, new start in Topeka

Topeka Capital-Journal, The, Aug 27, 2006 by Barbara Hollingsworth

By Barbara Hollingsworth

THE CAPITAL-JOURNAL

For 13-year-old Lataisha Fondal, Hurricane Katrina meant months of being homeless.

It meant living life in hotels, at one time sharing a room with 16 extended and close family members. It meant a new school, making new friends and finding her way to the counselor's office at Eisenhower Middle School when life away from New Orleans got to be too much.

A year later, it means moving on with newfound strength.

"I've certainly seen a lot more smiles this year, and there's a sparkle to her," counselor Susan Ross said of Lataisha at school on Friday.

The first half of last year was especially tough, they recalled.

"You think you've come a long way?" Ross asked of Lataisha.

"Yes," answered Lataisha, now an eighth-grader.

For Katrina's young victims, Hurricane Katrina has taken an emotional toll.

A survey of displaced New Orleans residents found that half of the parents said at least one of the children in their home developed new emotional or behavioral problems after the devastating hurricane on Aug. 29, 2005, according to the New York-based Children's Health Fund. Households had moved an average of 3.5 times.

For those who stayed in the region, a lack of health services has provided a stumbling block to recovery, said Dr. Arturo Brito, of the Children's Health Fund.

"There are people here that we learned they didn't have access to adequate health care, and that has exacerbated the problem for them," he said.

For those children who left, Brito said they had to mourn the loss of their surroundings while getting used to a new home, a new school and new peers. At the same time, he said, children pick up on the uneasiness of parents filled with anxiety about finding work and finding housing.

"These kids were in such shock," said Pat Hansen, a counselor at Landon Middle School, which had two Katrina kids last year. "They were shell-shocked. They were being transplanted into a place they'd never been and had lost all their friends and all their stuff and knew they would never get it back."

A few hundred hurricane evacuee children came to Kansas last year, totaling 350 during the first quarter of the school year, according to the Kansas State Department of Education. Next to Kansas City, Kan., Topeka Unified School District 501 took in the largest number of students displaced by the hurricanes at 84 children.

Some of those students left, while others have stayed on. Others still hope to return home.

Highland Park High School senior Shameka Ceazer has been back to New Orleans for visits but hopes to go home for good early next year.

"We're supposed to move back in February when our house is finished," she said, wearing her large "SHAMEKA" earrings - one of the only things she took with her when she waded through the streets of New Orleans after Katrina last year.

In some schools, having students arrive with nothing meant stepping up with help.

Hansen said Landon had a clothing drive and found others willing to help by donating school supplies. School workers even connected one mom with a lead on a new job. Students were tapped to show the new girls around and befriend the students.

One child simply wanted a teddy bear.

School, Hansen said, was to be a safe place that could provide consistency in all the upheaval. And she kept her door open to them.

"They needed somebody just to listen to them because they were grieving," she said. "They were literally in a war zone. There wasn't anything left for them. It was a sense of such hopelessness."

For Lataisha, Ross said things improved a lot when her family settled into an apartment.

She has been back to New Orleans for Mardi Gras and after her aunt died, but despite the things she misses, she isn't sure when she might return for good.

"I would want to go back but not in the next few years," she said. "There's nothing for me there."

Barbara Hollingsworth can be reached at (785) 295-1285 or

barbara.hollingsworth

@cjonline.com.