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New Orleans Students Describe Coping After Katrina

From left, MAX School students Adjoni Gibson, Jeremy Johnson, Torrie Lawson, Arielle Johnson, Alexander Antrum and Lorielle Ausama.
Photos by Andrea Hsu, NPR
From left, MAX School students Adjoni Gibson, Jeremy Johnson, Torrie Lawson, Arielle Johnson, Alexander Antrum and Lorielle Ausama.
A student-created collage about Katrina at the school.
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A student-created collage about Katrina at the school.

A child's-eye view of New Orleans must surely be a strange and scary thing. So many of the cultural landscapes they've always known -- the shops, homes, churches and schools -- were battered by a killer storm with a fairy princess name.

Before Hurricane Katrina, 64,000 students attended 123 public schools in New Orleans. Now 9,000 of them are back, mainly in charter schools.

The city's Catholic schools have fared better. Of the 40 schools open pre-Katrina, 30 are now back in business, serving nearly 15,000 students.

We recently stopped by the MAX School in uptown, a campus that combines youngsters from several Catholic schools damaged by Katrina. A group of seventh and eighth graders sat down in the library to talk to us about how Katrina touched their lives.

Copyright 2023 NPR. To see more, visit https://www.npr.org.

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