1720...

... deaths from Katrina with 135 still missing. Our President wants us to understand that Katrina was a "huge storm." He's also still blaming state and local officials... notice the way he directs questions away by referencing his appointee and the "local" control of the funds? Fact is, this is still a Federal failure and the Administration's response, particularly in LA has been downright criminal. Also, notice not one word about the Corps of Engineers or levees...

883 days before we can really start to rebuild LA and New Orleans.

 

I'm glad Bush is happy some schools in NOLA are open...

 

I'm glad Bush is happy with the amount of money going to Katrina... it's really helping the locals rebuild and the area needs a bit of Keynesian cash influx... oh, wait... nevermind.

 

BUSH: Louisiana is slower in terms of getting debris removed. The money is available to help remove that debris. People can get after it. And I would hope they would.

 

This gives confidence...

 

A few tidbits bolded...

 

Agreed, but the buck stops at the Fed level and all the rhetoric they throw at Nagain and Blanco doesn't change that. Again, if you look at the DHS legislation and their own policies and their own templates for just this kind of incident, they should have responded much, much better and done it according to their own rules within the Incident Command System. Instead, everything had to be routed through DHS and the WH for even the most basic decisions that could have been made on the ground. FEMA and DHS tried to impose their everyday bureaucracy on an emergency instead of trusting their people and they did this because that was the only way they could safely operate given the top down control coming out of the WH. The only group that came out of looking decent was the Coast Guard who essentially ignored both DHS and the WH and went about responding with planned competence. (And it really ticked the administration off by the way.) If everyone would have responded in a similar way, the tragedy would have been much reduced.

(I see the same thing happening in Iraq, where military decision are routed through politicos despite the rhetoric coming from the WH. For this administration only thinks in politics and hence, every decision must be political and controlled by the politicos in the WH. That doesn't work in a war and it doesn't work in an emergency.)

I should note that the Incident Command System is a radical idea for bureaucracies... only people with the training, experience and (for some of the higher positions) temperment are qualified. The other part is that the guy making the most money sitting in the corner office talking to his dad the Senator is probably not the best guy to have running an emergency and in fact the skills that got him to his position are probably antithetical to what is needed in an emergency. Organizations need to trust the people they train... FEMA didn't. DHS didn't. And the WH didn't trust anyone but themselves... that's a recipe for disaster and that's what we predictably got, though I didn't think it would be this bad... and I really thought enough people would be atching that they would have to do something good in the reconstruction phase... I guess I was wrong.

 

Rough Start for Effort to Remake Faltering New Orleans Schools
By SUSAN SAULNY
http://www.nytimes.com/2006/08/21/us/21recovery.html?pagewanted=print

NEW ORLEANS, Aug. 20 — On Debra Smith’s third attempt to enroll her younger sister in a public high school here last week, patience evaporated. For the student, disappointment turned into tears.

Ms. Smith said the school her sister, now a 10th grader, attended before Hurricane Katrina — one of just five the city is still operating — turned her away because of poor grades. Two other options were full.

“Why am I still sitting here begging to get a child into school?” Ms. Smith asked at a registration center teeming with confused and angry parents. Many saw their schools disappear with the storm, replaced by a small but labyrinthine system of state, city and charter-operated schools, each with its own rules, applications and starting dates.

“Why should I think the schools are going to be any better if they can’t handle the registration process?” she asked. “Where’s the space for these kids?”

For parents throughout the city, the first post-storm back-to-school season is having an inauspicious start. But it is perhaps most chaotic for those relying on a new state effort to rescue dozens of city schools that were a disaster even before Hurricane Katrina. The storm offered one of the worst school districts in the nation an opportunity for rebirth in the Recovery School District, state officials said.

The Recovery District, which was created in 2003, included five schools before the hurricane. But the district really began to take shape when the state took over 107 of the city’s worst-performing schools shortly after the storm. The Louisiana Department of Education had already considered the city school district to be in “academic crisis,” but after the hurricane, the district neared collapse. The state’s goal was to help the schools meet national performance standards and match the state graduation rate, among other things.

“The mission of the R.S.D. is to create a world-class public education system in New Orleans, in which every decision focuses on the best interests of the children,” the state’s promotional literature said.

Those lofty goals are at risk now because of a late start to planning for the school year. Well into the summer, it was still unclear how many schools would be chartered and how many teachers and classrooms would be needed. In addition, more students returned to New Orleans than state officials had expected.

The state began interviewing and hiring the hundreds of teachers needed for its Recovery schools only about a month ago. It has about 60 percent of the teachers it will need on Sept. 7, when 8,000 students are expected for the first day of school.

Compounding the problem, the district, with 17 schools, has only 10 administrative staff members, and they are not yet working in permanent offices. In addition, the district has said that at least one storm-damaged school building will not be ready before classes begin, and others face the same risk.

“It’s going to be a challenging year,” said Siona LaFrance, the district’s communications director. Ms. LaFrance added, though, that the district had just signed a lease for office space and that it would be hiring more staff members. She said the district hoped to avoid recreating the bloated bureaucracy of the old school district.

Still, the shaky start has deflated some of the optimism many residents had when they heard about the state taking over schools that the city had mismanaged over the years. It is particularly worrisome to those who are depending on the schools.

“That’s hurting to your heart when a child says, ‘Mama, I want to go to school,’ and you can’t find one,” said Yvonne Thompson, who is raising a 14-year-old granddaughter who needs special-education classes. Standing outside a registration center, Ms. Thompson added, “I don’t understand what’s going on.”

Robin Jarvis, the superintendent of the Recovery District, said no child would be denied a space. But Dr. Jarvis added that officials were grappling with having more students back in the city than had been expected. Nine of the 17 Recovery schools are already at capacity.

“We are operating more schools than people envisioned in the beginning, and there’s more manpower needed,” she said. “I think people anticipated a slower rate of return.”

Some fear that the opportunity to remake New Orleans by rebuilding the faltering core of its public education system is being squandered by a lack of planning. Many residents believe that the absence of a highly functioning educational system and the city’s notoriously high crime rate have been intertwined for decades.

While the state was working on its district, several local and national groups began creating charter schools, a system within a system that has grown to the largest group of charter schools in the nation. This fall, 33 of the schools are scheduled to open, receiving public money but operated by independent groups.

Some charter schools, however, have admissions requirements or the authority to reject students for a variety of reasons, the most common being lack of space. In addition, four of the five city-run schools have selective admission policies, based on academic and other factors. Students who cannot find a spot in a charter or city school will have to turn to the Recovery District, which is obligated to create space.

Out of concern that some charter schools were not accepting the most challenging students — those with physical or learning disabilities — the state added a clause to its contracts in May, Dr. Jarvis said, requiring them to admit a certain percentage of students with disabilities.

“There were some cases where parents said they were having trouble locating schools that would take them,” Dr. Jarvis said. “Part of our reasoning was to reduce that and say our expectation is that you will provide for these students.”

About 25,000 students are expected to enroll in public education in New Orleans this fall. Before the storm, the city had 65,000 students in more than 100 public schools.

Thousands of public school students who were accepted into charter or city schools have already begun classes. Many openings went smoothly, and parents have lauded the range of choices that was not available before the storm.

But it will be years before it is clear whether those choices lead to higher student achievement and better school performance.

“I think things are looking much, much better than they ever looked,” said Tanya Fobbs, a food service worker with two children who will be in public schools this year. Ms. Fobbs applied to charter and traditional schools, and is waiting to hear where her children have been accepted.

Many remain unsure, calling the new landscape fragmented, uncoordinated and uneven in terms of resources. Some charter schools, for instance, have proved to be powerhouses in winning approval for their ideas and galvanizing resources. Others, particularly in poor areas, have had trouble just getting started.

“We’ve created the most balkanized school system in North America,” said Lance Hill, director of the Southern Institute for Education and Research at Tulane University. “The average parent is mystified.”

Many reserve their harshest criticism for the Recovery District.

“It seems to me that the whole Recovery thing is hype,” said Jerome Smith, the longtime director of a community center in the Tremé neighborhood. “Here you have people, supposedly professionals, who don’t have teachers for the schools, and at the same time have not prepared well for this transition. They are going to be excused for their professional shortcomings, but the children will be penalized forever.”

Belden Banks said his 17-year-old niece wanted to drop out of the 12th grade last week after having registration problems at Clark High School. She was told she needed to bring a legal guardian, but she does not have one. The teenager has been separated from her displaced parents since the storm, Mr. Banks said.

“They should have made sure kids didn’t have any of these problems because they’ve been through so much already,” he said. “Just a few more classes until graduation, and now she’s all upset and wants to quit.”

He continued: “If they turn kids away, guess where they’re going to end up? On the corner. You hear about it when they get killed.”

 

Cry for Katrina's kids
As hurricane season returns, experts see a rising tide of mental health problems among the Gulf Coast's neglected youth.

By Tracy Clark-Flory

Aug. 22, 2006 | Psychologist Paula Madrid says that the experience of one of her young patients from New Orleans is all too common. The 13-year-old girl has entertained thoughts of suicide since Hurricane Katrina sent rapidly rising floodwaters through St. Bernard Parish, forcing her family of six onto the roof of a neighbor's home where for two days they waited hand-in-hand in the heat for rescue. Before a helicopter took the three kids to safety, they watched their uncle drown in the floodwaters.

The girl was bussed to Dallas, while her brothers, ages 8 and 12, were sent to the Astrodome in Houston. It was two weeks before they saw their parents again. The family then spent the next few weeks crammed in a hotel room with eight strangers, sometimes camping out in a tent and sharing a small pizza for dinner. After the father started abusing alcohol, the mother took the kids to live in a two-bedroom house in Baton Rouge, La., with seven other family members.

It was five months before the girl (whose name remains confidential under doctor-client privilege) received professional help to deal with her anguish. According to Madrid, who is director of the Resiliency Program at the National Center for Disaster Preparedness in New York, the girl's story is emblematic of what mental health professionals are seeing with children across the Gulf region, leaving them deeply concerned for "Katrina's kids" a year after the disaster.

Mental health experts agree that the scope of the damage, a lethargic rescue effort, and a still tentative recovery process have combined to make Hurricane Katrina uniquely damaging to children. After the trauma of the initial deluge, many spent days amid the terrifying pandemonium of the overstuffed Superdome, endured months of suitcase living, moved between family members' homes, FEMA trailers and hotels, and missed out on long periods of school. In essence, many of them remained in a suspended state of crisis that lasted months.

Even child psychologists who have extensive experience working with kids after natural disasters like hurricanes, floods and wildfires say Katrina's toll was unnerving. "I've never experienced being on the ground and seeing and hearing that degree of devastation and human despair," said Russell Jones, a psychology professor at Virginia Tech University and consultant for the National Child Traumatic Stress Network. In his eight visits to the Gulf region since Katrina, Jones said he encountered kids who had trouble eating and sleeping, exhibited hyper-vigilance, and seemed constantly in anticipation of an imminent disaster.

Recent studies have made clear that Katrina's emotional toll on kids has been severe. In July, Louisiana State University researchers presented findings from a screening of 4,000 children in the region: One-third showed signs of depression, while a third showed signs of full-blown post-traumatic stress disorder. A survey of 665 households released in April by Columbia University and the Children's Health Fund, a not-for-profit organization focused on medically underserved children, found that almost half of parents living in FEMA-subsidized housing reported a child who developed emotional or behavioral problems after the storm.

And estimates of the long-term toll are even more bleak. According to four child psychologists who spoke with Salon, based on standard models for forecasting the development of PTSD after exposure to trauma, at least 8 percent of the more than 1.2 million children under the age of 15 living in FEMA-declared disaster zones could be stricken. That's as many as 100,000 or more kids across the Gulf region.

In New Orleans, mental-health workers fear that in a city where mental health services were already poor at best before the storm, children will be cheated of critical mental health care. Before Katrina, Louisiana ranked lowest in the nation for state health based on a high number of uninsured citizens, meager public health funds, and a high child poverty rate, according to the United Health Foundation.

The hurricane ravaged New Orleans' hospitals, including Charity Hospital, the city's largest public hospital and principal source for acute psychiatric care. Today, there are 44 operational hospitals in the city, while 17 remain closed, according to the Louisiana Hospital Association. The Jefferson Parish Human Services Authority has closed one of its three facilities, but continues to offer the same level of services that it did pre-Katrina; the Metropolitan New Orleans Human Services District has reopened two of its five facilities, and has three temporary sites with limited services. More troubling is the lack of personnel. According to a report published in early August in the Journal of the American Medical Association, of the 196 psychiatrists practicing in the city before the storm, there are now only 22.

On Aug. 17, FEMA announced that $34 million has been set aside for mental-health counseling in Louisiana. That's in addition to the collaborative effort between FEMA and the Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration, a division of the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, to mobilize out-of-state assistance to help deal with the crisis. According to Kathryn Power, director of SAMHSA's Center for Mental Health Services, "over $12 million in personnel mission assignments, involving over 1,000 behavioral health professionals, have focused on direct support while the mental health systems in Louisiana, Mississippi and Alabama rebuild their infrastructure."

But some mental-health workers are skeptical of the actual impact of these mission assignments, which ended in March in Mississippi, and in June in Louisiana and Alabama. "It's a nice thing that a lot of people want to come down and help for a couple days or weeks," said Dr. Maurice Sholas, director of LSU's Pediatric Rehabilitation Program. "But that's like putting a bunch of band-aids on a big wound. The problems we have here are not going to be solved that way. You can throw a lot of money around and make a lot of sound but there's a need to rebuild the city's medical and psychiatric infrastructure."

Sholas said that New Orleans is in such "dire straits" that he wouldn't even begin to know where to send a child who needed to be hospitalized for a psychiatric illness. The psychiatry departments at LSU and Tulane University need to be strengthened for starters, he suggested, so that they can serve as a foundation for a new local infrastructure.

Complicating things is the fact that the extent of the crisis is not yet fully understood. "As we know, PTSD and depression are sometimes slow to emerge," said Dr. Raymond Crowel, vice president for mental health services at the National Mental Health Association. "For children, these symptoms might not make themselves known until this hurricane season."

"States certainly need to be as quick as possible in their role of coordinating and identifying where the help is most needed," Crowel said. But overwhelmed as they are, he argued, the Gulf states need support from the federal government in the form of Medicaid funds that allow disaster survivors to automatically be eligible. "As the [state and local] governments get themselves back on the ground, those federal emergency efforts can step down," Crowel said.

Crowel points to another serious problem: the exodus of skilled mental-health professionals at a time when the need is acute. "You've had providers who have moved out of the area, and those remaining in the area have been inundated with requests."

"What we're seeing now in the city is the extent of the devastation and the slowness of recovery," said Dr. Joy Osofsky, a professor of pediatrics, psychiatry and public health at LSU. "I'm optimistic that we have made some progress, but there will be an enormous need for mental health interventions. But I would prioritize trying to rebuild the local services as opposed to people coming from other communities to provide services for a few weeks and then leaving."

Nearly universal among child psychologists is one point of optimism -- that in general children are incredibly resilient. But crucially, this is most true when they are provided with a supportive and stable environment, both at home and at school.

With the latter, New Orleans still faces serious problems. Even including charter and state-run recovery schools, which the state Legislature introduced as an emergency measure, fewer than half of the city's public schools that were open before Katrina have reopened a year later. There were 117 public schools to accommodate 65,000 kids in New Orleans before the storm; there are now only four public schools, 18 recovery schools and 35 charter schools. The Columbia study found that "20 percent of school-aged children are either not enrolled in school or miss more than 10 school days each month."

"Even as a psychologist I will tell you that post-Katrina, the most important thing -- take away the psychologists and social workers -- is a sense of stability and a sense of connectedness," Madrid said. "Schools provide a sense of structure and continuity."

According to Osofsky of LSU, all of the operating schools in New Orleans now have an on-site social worker, and there are plans to contract with LSU to have psychologists working across the schools. In Louisiana, the Children's Health Fund has mobile units that serve neighborhoods most ravaged by the storm, providing children and families with access to mental-health professionals who specialize in trauma and children's issues. They also provide training for teachers and school clinicians.

Madrid worries that some school clinicians are unprepared to deal with the scope of this disaster. "These are clinicians who are, perhaps, not well trained. They do a good job, but are overworking themselves with stress," said Madrid, who has had workers break down in tears when telling her about their emotional exhaustion. She said that many of New Orleans' mental-health workers are experiencing "compassion fatigue" or "vicarious trauma." Compounding the struggle is that many of these workers have lived through the very trauma experienced by their patients.

Misdiagnosed or untreated PTSD in Katrina's kids is only magnified by a city still deeply submerged in the struggle to recover, and could lead to problems as far as 10 to 15 years down the line, Madrid said. "Having experienced so much trauma and disconnection from others, it's scary," she said. "These are their formative years. This is when they should be learning about safety, appropriate care for themselves and others. If they're not picking up on that now, how will they end up as parents?"

http://www.salon.com/news/feature/2006/08/22/katrinas_kids/print.html

 

And I don't disagree with you... I just question the perspective... when you phrase it like that some might read it as if all parties are equally at fault when by their own laws and regs the Feds should have been there before, during, and after... those laws and regs written, incidentally, under the tested assumption that local and state governments could be overwhelmed by events and only the Feds had the money and manpower to deal with large scale disasters. If Katrina had been a terrorist nuke for which we had days of warning, would the Feds have waited? Would they have claimed they couldn't act unless asked by the Gov? Would they have watched the locals struggling to evacuate a major American city and done nothing? Would the President have not asked a single question during a briefing? (Wait, don't answer that one.) Would they have sat around for days after the bomb went off and done little or nothing to help the people affected? No to all but the one, yet this is what happened during Katrina. It's inexcusable.

I admit my profession probably colors my thinking here a little bit... If we have a 100 acre forest fire, the local volunteers and some engines from State Forestry can usually handle it... if it goes to 1,000, the Feds should be sending reinforcements because the locals are going to get tired and be overwhelmed... if it gets to 10,000 acres, the Feds are usually in control (unless it's in on state lands in a rich state that has lots of resources like Cal... but not like LA), if it goes to 100,000 acres, the Feds ought to be there in force with every logisitical and tactical support mechanism possible... if it goes to 1,000,000 then every available Fed is either working the fire or en route. With Katrina, we told New Orleans and the State of Louisiana to handle a 1,000,000 acre forest fire by themselves for almost a week and then the people who were required by the very laws they themselves advocated and ran on (see the ads against Cleland) blamed the city and state for being incompetents to take the heat off of themselves for not responding. Yes, there are some things NOLA and LA could have done better, but it's not like Katrina snuck up on people... the Coast Guard knew what was about to happen and planned accordingly... why couldn't other elements of DHS/FEMA?