On what was supposed to be the first day of school in some Texas districts, the state with the nation’s second-largest
K-12 student population was in educational crisis Monday, with hundreds
of thousands of families reeling from the effects of Hurricane Harvey.
Teachers, students and parents were unsure when classes would be in
session, and who, exactly, would be reporting to which schools, when
opening bells finally ring.
More than 160 Texas public school districts and 30 charter schools
were closed, according to an initial count. The upheaval threatened
schools across the state, even ones unaffected by the storm itself, as
families flee to San Antonio, Austin, Dallas and other cities with
school systems already dealing with their own financial and academic
challenges.
At
an Austin sports arena being used as a shelter, Shirelle Franklin, 31,
sat on a cot near her four children, three of whom attend schools in the
Coastal Plains town of Victoria, Tex. Ms. Franklin said her family’s
apartment complex sustained extensive damage, so she was unsure when she
would be able to return home. Classes at district schools in Victoria
have been postponed until next week.
The
family fled abruptly with little time to gather school materials. Ms.
Franklin’s 14-year old son, Noey Alvarez, Jr., worried about falling
behind academically. “I don’t like to miss out and having to catch up,”
he said.
In
Houston, Arelis Vallecilla, Chad Stearns and their six school-age
children were preparing to spend the night in a shelter at the George R.
Brown Convention Center.
“We
lost everything,” Ms. Vallecilla, 38, said. Floodwaters destroyed their
home, their truck and virtually all their possessions, including nearly
$900 in new school uniforms and shoes.
Her
children had spent the day playing checkers instead of learning in a
classroom. They had been looking forward to the start of the school year
this week, Ms. Vallecilla added, but their studies were now in limbo.
The situation recalled one that many New Orleans residents faced in 2005, when Hurricane Katrina
severely damaged most public school buildings and incited sweeping
education reform efforts that remain controversial 12 years later. At
that time, more than 100,000 New Orleans residents fled to the Houston area, whose schools absorbed over 20,000 displaced students. Many of those children struggled academically and socially.
Now the Houston region, among the hardest hit by Harvey, may lose some of its own students.
The
closed districts in Texas stretched some 300 miles along the Gulf
Coast, from Corpus Christi, close to where Harvey made landfall, to as
far north as Beaumont. Inland schools, too, were closed on Monday,
including many east of Austin.
A
number of local districts, including Houston’s, the state’s largest and
the seventh-largest district in the nation, said they hoped that
Tuesday, Sept. 5, would be the first day of class. But local and state
officials acknowledged that they could not predict exactly when
buildings would be safe to re-enter and roads to schools would be
passable.
“I
don’t think we know for sure when everybody will be back,” said Lauren
Callahan, a spokeswoman with the Texas Education Agency. “It’s too early
to tell how many schools have sustained physical damage.”
Doug
Harris, director of the Education Research Alliance for New Orleans at
Tulane University, is an expert on how school systems react to natural
disasters. It will be important, he said, for the State of Texas and
local schools to be flexible in terms of where displaced or homeless
students enroll, and to make sure that struggling families — including
Texas’ many undocumented immigrants — are comfortable turning to public
schools for help.
“The
highest priority has to be getting students back to school,” Mr. Harris
said. “And counseling. There was a lot of trauma after Katrina.”
Richard
Carranza, superintendent of the Houston Independent School District,
estimated that as of Monday afternoon, 35 of the city’s school buildings
— more than 10 percent of the total — had power outages or had flooded.
With rain forecast for days, the damage could get much worse.
“It’s
a Houston-wide tragedy, so everybody is being impacted, our employees
and our families,” Mr. Carranza said. “We’ve been really transparent
that weather conditions and, quite frankly, city infrastructure are
going to determine whether we are going to safely be able to open” on
Sept. 5, as planned.
Charter
schools, which educate about a fifth of the city’s public school
students, were also affected. Harmony Public Schools, which operates 15
charter schools in the Houston metropolitan area, said that one of its
campuses sustained major flood damage. At KIPP Houston, which operates
28 charter schools serving 14,000 students, officials said they were
still unable to access many of their buildings to make a full damage
assessment. About 40 KIPP Houston families had lost their homes and many
had been evacuated.
Dawn
Kotecki, a teacher at Cesar Chavez High School in southeast Houston,
was setting up her social studies classroom with a group of student
volunteers on Friday morning, when the principal directed everyone to
evacuate the building within minutes — the hurricane was coming, and the
school year would not begin as expected.
After
Harvey, Chavez students and teachers will face a host of challenges. A
bayou behind the building overflowed and reached school grounds, Ms.
Kotecki said. And an unknown number of students and teachers were
evacuated or had lost their homes.
Ms.
Kotecki, who was safe at her own home in suburban Pasadena, Tex., said
she was raising money and collecting clothing, personal hygiene items
and school supplies via Facebook. When Chavez opens for the year, “We
will do a daily check-in” with students, she said. “Is everything O.K.
at home? Did you get a good night’s rest? Did you have a good breakfast?
If not, we will make sure that they do.”
The
Houston school district serves approximately 215,000 students, more
than three-quarters of whom are low-income. Harvey made landfall at a politically sensitive time
for the city’s schools. In early August, the state informed the school
board that the district was at risk of a state takeover, because of a
2015 law that targets districts with persistently underperforming
schools.
Those
15 struggling schools are clustered in the city’s poorest
neighborhoods, and two to three of their buildings are among those with
serious physical damage, according to Mr. Carranza, the superintendent.
When Hurricane Katrina hit New Orleans in 2005, four-fifths of the city’s school buildings flooded, resulting in an estimated $600 to $800 million in damage.
It took most schools more than four months to reopen, according to Mr.
Harris of the Education Research Alliance for New Orleans, and even
middle-class students were reclassified as homeless, as families
struggled to rebuild or find new homes.
That physical devastation remade education policy in the city. Louisiana’s Recovery School District law,
which dated back to 2003, was used to dismiss thousands of teachers,
expand the charter school sector and, in general, decrease local control
of the city’s education system.
It
is not yet clear if Houston and other Texas school districts have
sustained comparable physical damage. Mr. Harris noted that Houston
schools are in stronger condition than New Orleans schools were before
Katrina: Houston’s buildings were constructed much more recently and are
in better shape.
Mr.
Carranza, the Houston superintendent, said that after the crisis of
Hurricane Harvey passes, the district would resume its work turning
around the low-performing schools on the state’s watch list.
In
the short term, however, “I haven’t spent a lot of time thinking about”
the potential for a state takeover, he said. “We’re in lifesaving
mode.”
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