Protection During Displacement

The Guiding Principles address national governments’ obligations to protect people during displacement, regardless of whether that displacement is due to conflict or disaster. The Principles guarantee, among other things, the human right to dignity, security, liberty of movement, and respect of family life. They also forbid discrimination of any sort, whether it be on the basis of race, language, national origin, legal or social status, age, disability, or property. The U.S. government failed to uphold these principles in a number of ways during Hurricane Katrina.

 

Discrimination Against the Poor and People of Color

One way in which the U.S. government failed to uphold the principle of nondiscrimination was by funding an evacuation plan for Louisiana⁷¹ that relied on personal vehicles as the primary means of escape, essentially denying those who do not own cars of the right-to-life protections available to those who do.⁷²

While about 80 percent of New Orleans residents heeded the mandatory evacuation order issued before Katrina,⁷³ tens of thousands stayed behind—and the number-one reason they gave was that they lacked cars.⁷⁴ Indeed, at the time of the storm, about one-third of New Orleanians—approximately 120,000 people—did not own automobiles.⁷⁵

Furthermore, people of color, who constituted the majority of New Orleans’ pre-Katrina population, are less likely to own cars than whites. In 2000, only 7 percent of white U.S. households did not own cars, compared to 17 percent of Latino households and 24 percent of black households.⁷⁶ To craft; an evacuation plan relying on private vehicles in the face of these facts is a failure to apply Guiding Principle 4, which states that the other principles—in this case, the right to life—shall be applied without discrimination of any kind, including on the basis of property.⁷⁷

 

Abandoning the Elderly and the Disabled

Besides the poor, another social group that faced special difficulties evacuating—and who consequently suffered and died in disproportionate numbers—was the elderly. A study released in August 2007 by pathologists with the Louisiana State University Health Sciences Center in New Orleans looked at the approximately 850 autopsies they performed of storm victims and found that 64 percent were people age 65 and older—more than five times the percentage of New Orleanians in that age group.⁷⁸ An earlier analysis found that of the more than 1,300 people in Mississippi and Louisiana who died during Katrina and the ensuing floods, nearly 40 percent were over the age of 71.⁷⁹

There was a great deal of media attention paid to the drowning deaths of 35 residents of one New Orleans-area nursing home after the owners declined to evacuate because they did not anticipate the levee breaches; a jury ultimately declined to find them guilty of negligent homicide charges brought by the state of Louisiana.⁸⁰ But in other cases, the deaths of nursing home residents during the disaster were due to preventable problems with the evacuation. For instance, among the very first casualties of Katrina were two elderly nursing home residents who died on a school bus that took three hours to load and another five hours to travel from New Orleans to Baton Rouge, La. A third resident died later at the hospital, and 21 others were treated for dehydration after the trip on buses that lacked air-conditioning and water and that had no certified nurses on board.⁸¹ The official U.S. House of Representatives’ report on Hurricane Katrina concluded that nursing home evacuation decisions “were subjective and, in one case, led to preventable deaths.”⁸²

Clearly, elderly persons’ right to life was not adequately protected, which implicates the nondiscrimination clause of Guiding Principle 4, as well as that principle’s other clause stating that certain IDPs including the elderly “shall be entitled to protection and assistance required by their condition and to treatment which takes into account their special needs.”⁸³ That did not happen during Katrina, with tragic results.

Nursing homes were not the only health care facilities where human rights were not protected adequately during the Katrina disaster. The House of Representatives’ report documented numerous problems with the provision of medical care during and after the storm, which in some instances appear to contravene the Guiding Principles.

For example, the House found that New Orleans was “unprepared to provide evacuations and medical care for its special needs population and dialysis patients,” and that Louisiana officials even “lacked a common definition” of special needs. New Orleans designated the Superdome as a special needs shelter and followed an evacuation plan that focused on moving special needs patients there—even though during the Hurricane Pam readiness exercise a year earlier the city and state had agreed to coordinate a plan to transport and shelter such patients farther north. Though authorities included dialysis in their definition of special needs, the Superdome “did not have the personnel, facilities, or supplies to provide dialysis,” the House reported. The Superdome lacked even something as basic as food for diabetics. The government’s failure to plan for the needs of IDPs with physical disabilities constitutes a form of discrimination prohibited under the Guiding Principles.

The House report also found that medical care during the Katrina crisis “suffered from a lack of advance preparations, inadequate communications, and difficulties coordinating efforts.” Deployment of medical care “was reactive, not proactive.” Poor planning and failure to pre-position medical supplies and equipment “led to delays and shortages.” Hospital emergency plans “did not offer concrete guidance about if or when evacuations should take place,” and “were not adequately prepared for a full evacuation.” The government “did not effectively coordinate private air transport capabilities for the evacuation of medical patients.” Needed medical care for IDPs was delayed by “deployment confusion, uncertainty about mission assignments, and government red tape.” These government failures led to unsatisfactory health conditions and impeded and delayed access to essential medical services in noncompliance with several Guiding Principles.

 

Improper Accommodations for IDPs

The Guiding Principles state that government authorities must ensure “to the greatest practicable extent” that IDPs are provided with “proper accommodation” and conditions of “safety, nutrition, health and hygiene.”⁸⁷ These principles were not honored at the government-provided refuge in New Orleans or in the temporary government housing provided to tens of thousands of displaced families after the storm. In apparent violation of its own mandatory evacuation order, the New Orleans government bused residents who were unable or unwilling to leave to the city’s Superdome sports facility,⁸⁸ which served as a refuge of last resort for about 25,000 people.⁸⁹ But the facility lacked adequate food, water and medical care, and toilets overflowed, covering floors with human excrement.⁹⁰ People were forced to relieve themselves in the building’s dark corners.⁹¹ By Wednesday, August 31, there was no food or water left at all,⁹² yet the facility was not completely evacuated until Sunday, September 4.⁹³

There were similarly inhumane conditions at the city’s Convention Center, which served as an informal refuge and rescue drop-off point for about 20,000 people.⁹⁴ Women faced special security problems in government-run refuges for the displaced, with Louisiana’s sexual assault database recording 70 attacks during and after the storm—and at least a dozen of them occurring at official emergency shelters and public sites.⁹⁵

There have been other threats to the health and safety of IDPs due to governmental failures to provide proper accommodations. Since Katrina, over 120,000 displaced Gulf Coast residents have lived in temporary mobile homes and travel trailers issued by FEMA.⁹⁶ As early as May 2006, the Sierra Club reported that it had tested 31 trailers for indoor pollution and found only two where the levels of formaldehyde—a gas emitted by pressed wood products that the Environmental Protection Agency considers a suspected human carcinogen—were at or below the safety limit set by the federal government.⁹⁷ In several trailers, the levels were more than three times the limit.⁹⁸ “It makes everybody stuffed up,” trailer resident Cynthia Willis told a Mississippi TV station. “You can’t breathe or anything.”⁹⁹

There is strong evidence that federal officials were slow to act—and may have tried to prevent information on the safety risks from being made public. According to an internal FEMA document disclosed by CBS News, FEMA knew of extremely high levels of formaldehyde after its own employee safety department ran tests in March 2006.¹⁰⁰ Carried out on 28 trailers, those tests found at least 20 had levels of formaldehyde much higher than the Environmental Protection Agency’s recommended workplace limit of .1 parts per million—in one case, as much as 1,000 percent higher.¹⁰¹

In July 2007, a U.S. House committee found that “FEMA leaders had suppressed warnings about the presence of high levels of potentially cancer-causing formaldehyde [in FEMA trailers], apparently to avoid legal liability,” according to the Washington Post.¹⁰² It wasn’t until September 2007 that FEMA began to publicize its decision to allow 60,000 Katrina-displaced families living in trailers to move into hotel or motel rooms if they are concerned about formaldehyde.¹⁰³

Displaced persons living in FEMA trailers continue to be subjected to other health and safety threats. For example, a survey of 400 residents living in temporary FEMA trailers in April and May 2006 and published in The Annals of Emergency Medicine found that the rate of depression among trailer park residents is seven times the national average, and that suicide attempts were roughly 79 times higher than before the disaster.¹⁰⁴ Nearly half of respondents noted a lack of security as a problem faced in travel trailer parks.¹⁰⁵

 

Special Problems for Women and Children in FEMA Trailer Camps

Even before the devastation of Katrina, the U.S. Gulf states of Louisiana and Mississippi already had some of the highest child poverty rates in the nation. In the 19 Louisiana parishes designated disaster areas after the storm, an average of 23 percent of the under-eighteen population lived below the poverty level, while countywide poverty rates were as high as 34 percent.¹⁰⁷ In the 47 Mississippi counties designated disaster areas, an average of 27 percent of the under-18 population lived in poverty, with countywide rates reaching 36 percent.¹⁰⁸

The hurricane threw the lives of impoverished children into further disarray, with the problems they already faced exacerbated by the government’s decision to emphasize temporary housing solutions. The fact that the manufactured travel trailers and mobile homes purchased from private contractors exposed IDPs of all ages to dangerously high levels of the toxic chemical formaldehyde was discussed in the previous section on accommodations for IDPs. But government-provided transitional housing for storm evacuees presents other physical and social hazards for children.

In 2006, the nongovernmental organization Save the Children assessed temporary housing camps for hurricane-displaced children and families, reporting numerous problems.¹⁰⁹ The cramped trailers and densely populated camps led to community tensions and heightened family conflicts. Many families had either lost their vehicles or didn’t have any to begin with, and public transportation was often difficult to access.

Group campsites were often “bleak and unwelcoming,” the assessment found. “For example, Zirlott Park (Alabama) is dominated by broad roads and is without vegetation. The children have no playground but can see a ball field through a recently installed chain-link fence.” Only three of twenty sites provided space for communal gatherings, programs or activities for children, or religious services. In response to the findings, Save the Children and FEMA launched the Safe and Protective Communities pilot project to try to improve the environment for children in the camps.¹¹⁰

Save the Children investigators also found children who were separated from their parents in eleven of twenty sites. Among the reasons residents gave for the separations were transportation, quality of life, separation during rescue and sheltering after the storm, and inaccessibility of medical care. These separations are in contradiction to Guiding Principle 17 that holds authorities responsible for ensuring that family members are not separated, for allowing family members who wish to stay together to do so, and for reuniting separated families “as quickly as possible.”

In addition, Save the Children found instances where children residing in trailer camps were not attending school because of poor treatment by local school authorities and transportation problems. Under the Guiding Principles, every human being has the right to education, and governments are obligated to provide “free and compulsory” primary education to internally displaced children.

Residents at five out of twenty Gulf Coast trailer sites surveyed by Save the Children reported alcohol abuse, domestic violence and poor relationships with the local community, while residents at four sites reported sexual assaults.¹¹¹ And the 2006 survey of400 people living in temporary FEMA trailers that was discussed in the previous section on accommodations for IDPs found that incidences of domestic violence were nearly triple the yearly baseline rates before displacement, while rapes reported since displacement were nearly 54 times the national yearly average.¹¹²

 

Property Rights at Risk

Under the Guiding Principles, governments are obligated to protect IDPs from being arbitrarily deprived of property and possessions, and to ensure that property and possessions left behind by IDPs are protected against destruction and arbitrary and illegal appropriation. The U.S. government’s actions to uphold these principles have been inadequate.

Shortly after the storms, FEMA declared 60,000 homes in the hurricane disaster area to be “beyond repair” and slated them for demolition. Yet FEMA admitted that many inspections were “rapid exterior inspections” or satellite-produced, denying important procedural safeguards to displaced homeowners before the potential loss of their property.¹¹³

Many displaced persons were also given insufficient notice of plans to demolish their homes. In New Orleans, for example, residents could not ascertain whether or not their homes were slated for demolition, much less seek judicial recourse to contest the decision.¹¹⁴ The New Orleans city council agreed to take steps to adequately notify owners of the demolitions of their homes only after settling a lawsuit.¹¹⁵ It also created an appeals process for homeowners to challenge city demolition orders, but it was available only to those able to physically visit City Hall.¹¹⁶ Over 1,000 homes were demolished in New Orleans in the year after Hurricane Katrina struck.¹¹⁷

In June 2006, the rights of displaced property owners were put at further risk when the New Orleans City Council unanimously passed City Ordinance 26031, which set a deadline of August 29, 2006 for homeowners to gut flood-damaged buildings or have them condemned.¹¹⁸ Residents strongly criticized the measure on the grounds that the city failed to properly notify displaced homeowners of the decision, and that promised funds to compensate displaced homeowners for gutting costs were not made available. The deadline was extended after widespread public outcry.¹¹⁹

Then in February 2007, the City Council passed a new law in response to what members saw as the administration’s slow progress in enforcing the 2006 law. The new policy said that after a building was judged by an inspector to pose “a serious and imminent threat,” the owner would be notified that the city could demolish it after 30 business days by regular mail to their last known address and posting of notices on the property, the city’s Web site, and in three consecutive issues of the local newspaper.¹²⁰

However, the city has received numerous complaints that buildings have been demolished or placed on published lists of properties to be razed without prior notice to the displaced owners, and that some buildings have been demolished even though they were in sound condition and had been gutted and secured.¹²¹ In August 2007, five New Orleans homeowners sued Mayor Ray Nagin and his administration, saying the city illegally demolished their gutted, salvageable homes and demanding that the authorities either rebuild the structures or compensate them for their losses.¹²²

Furthermore, the U.S. government has done little to ensure displaced persons receive proper compensation from insurance companies, further putting them at risk of arbitrary loss of property. Homeowners have filed 6,600 insurance-related lawsuits in the Federal District Court in New Orleans, and 4,700 formal complaints have been lodged with the Louisiana Department of Insurance.¹²³ The state of Louisiana estimates that homeowners have, on average, received $5,700 less than insurance companies rightfully owed them.¹²⁴ In November 2007, Louisiana Attorney General Charles Foti filed suit against a number of major insurers as well as their software suppliers and consultants, alleging the companies participated in an ongoing scheme to rig the value of property damage claims with the goal of increasing company profits.¹²⁵ There were similar problems with insurers in Mississippi, where state Attorney General Jim Hood sued insurance companies soon after Katrina. In early 2007, Hood reached a legal settlement with one major insurer over improper claims denials but then later sued it for breaching the agreement.¹²⁶ More than two years after Katrina, that suit still remained unresolved.

 

Discrimination Against Immigrant IDPs

Immigrants suffered special problems during the Katrina disaster because of government discrimination, even though the Guiding Principles state that humanitarian aid and assistance shall be provided without discrimination of any kind— including on the basis of language, national origin, or legal status. And because many of these immigrants were also non-citizens, they faced additional disadvantages because they do not enjoy the full rights of citizens.

According to census data, more than one million foreign-born individuals lived in parts of the Gulf Coast affected by Katrina as well as Hurricane Rita¹²⁷; a quarter of these immigrants came from Mexico and Vietnam.¹²⁸ Yet government authorities largely failed to alert residents of the approaching storm in any language other than English.

When governments did issue warnings in other languages, they typically came late and were of limited reach. For example, the Mississippi city of Hattiesburg distributed warning flyers in Spanish at Latino-occupied apartment complexes the day before the storm hit, but there was no similar effort to warn Spanish speakers who lived outside those complexes.¹²⁹ Three months after Katrina, the U.S. government changed the Emergency Alert System so storm warnings would be issued in the primary language used by the station or cable system broadcasting the announcement,¹³⁰ but this change will be of little help to rural Gulf communities that lack non-English-language media.

Immigrant IDPs also experienced unique problems accessing humanitarian aid after Katrina. For example, FEMA refused to assure that information about immigrants’ legal status would not be shared with law enforcement agencies,¹³¹ as it did following the September 2001 terrorist attacks on New York.¹³² There were instances in which law officers entered shelters run by the American Red Cross and demanded identification from people who appeared to be Latinos.¹³³ And there were situations in which volunteers with the American Red Cross—which holds the legal status of a “federal instrumentality” under its congressional charter¹³⁴—themselves reportedly demanded identification from people seeking aid.¹³⁵

Further discouraging immigrants from requesting assistance was the fact that FEMA’s relief offices used Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) officers as security, and that its aid application warned that the information supplied would be shared with ICE.¹³⁶ This sort of bias against immigrants to receive storm warnings and to access humanitarian aid contradicts Guiding Principle 4, which forbids discrimination against IDPs on the basis of language, national or ethnic origin, and legal status.¹³⁷

 

Conditions for Prisoners and Detainees

The treatment of inmates and detainees at Louisiana’s Orleans Parish Prison (OPP) before and during the post-Katrina evacuation is another situation where the Guiding Principles were not adhered to—specifically, the prohibitions against carrying out displacement in a manner that violates the rights to dignity and protection from violence;¹³⁸ cruel, inhuman or degrading treatment or punishment;¹³⁹ and discrimination on the basis of legal status.¹⁴⁰ The problems at the facility have been documented in detail by the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) National Prison Project, which represents inmates in a longstanding federal lawsuit over conditions there.¹⁴¹

During the storm and for several days afterwards, several thousand men, women, and children as young as ten—many of them being held in pre-trial detention on minor offenses—were effectively abandoned as floodwaters rose and the power went out, plunging the cells into darkness.¹⁴² As deputies fled their posts, prisoners were left standing up to their chests in sewage-contaminated floodwaters, without food, drinking water, or ventilation.¹⁴³

Once they were evacuated from OPP, prisoners were sent to receiving facilities around the state where human rights abuses appear to have continued.¹⁴⁴ At one facility, for example, thousands of OPP evacuees spent several days on an outdoor football field where there were no toilets or wash facilities, and where prisoner-on-prisoner violence went unchecked by guards.¹⁴⁵ A recent ACLU report examining changes made at the prison since the disaster concluded that “OPP remains dangerously ill prepared to handle a future emergency,” with a revised evacuation plan that is “inconsistent” and “inadequate” to prevent the kinds of abuses that occurred after Katrina.¹⁴⁶

Pregnant women were among those most severely affected by conditions at the prison. At the time the storm hit, there were an undetermined number of pregnant women at OPP, with at least ten eventually evacuated to another Louisiana prison.¹⁴⁷ Two women reported suffering miscarriages at OPP after the storm; one of them was seven months pregnant at the time and claims she got no medical care until she was moved to the Louisiana State Penitentiary at Angola.¹⁴⁸ The other was evacuated to a highway overpass where, she later reported, prisoners “slept out there all night long in urine because we couldn’t get up. I passed out because I was bleeding very bad. No we didn’t receive water or food. They refuse to give me medical service at all. . . . I thought I was going to die and never see my kids or family ever again.”¹⁴⁹

Although the government authorities deny that there were any deaths at OPP,¹⁵⁰ deputies and prisoners reported witnessing deaths—including the death of a pregnant teen. As Deputy Deborah Williams told the American Civil Liberties Union: “It was horrible. Two of our kids drowned, and there was nothing we could do to help them. One of them was pregnant.”¹⁵¹ The government’s failure to take adequate steps to protect pregnant women prisoners implicates Guiding Principle 4, which requires governments to provide special protection and assistance to certain classes of IDPs, including expectant mothers.

 

Other Criminal Justice Abuses During Displacement

There were other apparent human rights abuses involving IDPs and criminal justice authorities in the wake of Katrina, including two incidents that took place on New Orleans area bridges.

The first occurred three days after Katrina on Thursday, September 1 on the Crescent City Connection linking predominantly black New Orleans to the majority white Jefferson Parish suburb of Gretna.¹⁵² As a group of about 200 IDPs including New Orleans residents, tourists, people in wheelchairs, and babies in strollers attempted to cross from the flooded city, they were met by Gretna police and other local law enforcement officials who forcibly turned them back, firing warning shots into the air.¹⁵³

Amid controversy over those actions and accusations of racism, the Gretna City Council passed a resolution supporting the police chief’s decision to block the bridge, pointing out that Gretna had already taken in thousands of IDPs from New Orleans at that point and citing concerns that there were not adequate resources to care for any more.¹⁵⁴ An Orleans Parish grand jury declined to indict one Gretna police officer on charges of illegally using a weapon in connection with the firing of a gun on the bridge,¹⁵⁵ while the Louisiana attorney general has declined to pursue any criminal charges in the incident,¹⁵⁶ which is the subject of a pending federal lawsuit¹⁵⁷. But regardless of the explanation for what happened on the Gretna bridge, the police officers’ actions appear to have contradicted the Guiding Principles, which hold that IDPs have the rights to “liberty of movement”¹⁵⁸ and “to seek safety in another part of the country.”¹⁵⁹

The second bridge incident took place on Sunday, September 4 on the Danziger Bridge spanning New Orleans’ Industrial Canal. Responding to reports of a downed colleague, seven city policy officers rushed to the site, where they shot two people to death and injured four others,¹⁶⁰ causing one to lose an arm and another to undergo a colostomy.¹⁶¹

While police claim they were shot at first, no weapons have been recovered linked to the civilians on the bridge, and the survivors insist they did nothing to provoke police.¹⁶² An autopsy showed that one of the people killed—a developmentally disabled 40-year-old named Ronald Madison—was shot in the back.¹⁶³ The seven officers have been indicted for murder and attempted murder and are awaiting trial.¹⁶⁴ If found guilty, the officers will have breached the section of Guiding Principle 10 which holds that IDPs must be protected against murder and summary or arbitrary executions.¹⁶⁵

 

SIDEBAR

Sick and Left Behind

Dr. Anna Pou is a physician who worked at New Orleans’ Memorial Medical Center during Hurricane Katrina’s chaotic aftermath, one of the hundreds of caregivers who selflessly agreed to stay behind as the storm approached and care for people in need. In all, between 220 and 300 patients were stranded at the Tenet Healthcare-owned facility during the disaster; 45 bodies were found afterwards, though some of those patients had died before the storm.⁸⁴ Pou was later charged with murdering nine patients who were found to have high blood levels of morphine or other medications.⁸⁵

A grand jury refused to indict Pou, who denied trying to kill anyone. But the case shined a spotlight on the horrendous conditions in which patients and their caregivers languished for days due to poor planning—with no power, no potable water, in complete darkness, human waste everywhere. Backup generators failed because they had been located in places vulnerable to flooding. As temperatures climbed, staff members at some hospitals were forced to smash out fixed windows using furniture.

“We’re having to care for patients by flashlight,” Pou later recounted in an interview with Newsweek magazine. “There were patients that were moaning, patients that are crying. We’re trying to cool them off. We had some dirty water we could use, some ice. We were sponging them down, giving them sips of bottled water, those who could drink. The heat was—there is no way to describe that heat. I was in it and I can’t believe how hot it was. There are people fanning patients with cardboard, nurses everywhere, a few doctors and wall-to-wall patients. Patients are so frightened and we’re saying prayers with them.”

A report by the Urban Institute on hospitals during Hurricane Katrina found that 1,749 patients occupied the eleven New Orleans-area hospitals that were surrounded by floodwaters, yet there were no city or state plans for moving patients in the event of a catastrophe. Noting that hospitals had been excluded from the city’s emergency plan, the report urged that they be included in areawide disaster and evacuation planning in the future.

The failure of government authorities and hospitals to establish adequate evacuation plans for people with medical problems implicates the Guiding Principles’ strictures against carrying out displacement in a way that violates IDPs’ rights to life and dignity.⁸⁶

 

SIDEBAR

FEMA’s Toxic Trailers

Two years after Hurricane Katrina, Sharon Hanshaw was still living in a FEMA trailer—and she believes her health was hurting because of it.

The executive director of Coastal Women for Change, a Biloxi, Mississippi-based nonprofit that works to involve residents in reconstruction planning, Hanshaw suffered from a raspy cough she developed soon after moving in. She knows of other trailer dwellers who have gone to the hospital repeatedly for similar respiratory problems. While independent testing has found the trailers were off-gassing dangerous levels of formaldehyde, many units are also infested with mold, compounding residents’ health problems and forcing cash-strapped families to continuously replace ruined items. These conditions implicate the Guiding Principles’ guarantees that IDPs be provided with “proper accommodation” and conditions of “safety, nutrition, health and hygiene.”

Despite the poor conditions in the trailers, though, moving out isn’t an option for many residents— especially not for those who hold low-paying jobs in the Mississippi coast’s tourist-oriented service economy, which is dominated by casinos, hotels and restaurants. Indeed, a recent study by the RAND Corp. found that affordable housing recovery in three Mississippi coastal counties heavily damaged by Katrina lags behind the pace of the rest of the housing market in the region.¹⁰⁶

“How can you live on $7 an hour when housing is more expensive?” asks Hanshaw, who reports that the area’s home and apartment costs have doubled since the storm. “People are working two jobs just to survive.”

 

SIDEBAR

It’s Hard to Learn When You’re Hungry

It wasn’t only FEMA trailer camps where storm-displaced children faced problems getting an education after Katrina. Students across New Orleans also encountered difficulties in attending school. Not only did that contravene the Guiding Principles’ provision that governments provide “free and compulsory” primary education to displaced children, but it also created problems for displaced families attempting to exercise their right to return.

Shortly after the storm, Louisiana’s Recovery School District (RSD) took over administration of most of the city’s schools. But it had difficulties ensuring there were enough teachers to meet demand, in part because it had fired all 4,000 of the system’s employees and required teachers to seek new certification before being rehired. Consequently, in January 2007 the RSD was forced to place about 300 students on waiting lists because there was no room for them in the city’s schools, sparking civil rights lawsuits.

Another problem plaguing the city’s schools was a jaillike atmosphere due in part to a security contract with The Guidry Group of Texas that in the 2006-2007 school year ballooned from $4.4 million to $20 million. In July 2007, public education advocates including Friends and Families of Louisiana’s Incarcerated Children (FFLIC) held a rally calling for school authorities to scrap the deal, which they complained was turning the city’s schools into prisons. Because some schools combined elementary and middle-school students after the storm, even some elementary-age children had to pass through metal detectors on their way to class.

“People’s minds have been conditioned to believe that whenever something happens we need more security guards and more police to keep us safe,” says FFLIC organizer Damekia Morgan. “But that tends to instigate problems rather than helping the situation.”

While new RSD Superintendent Paul Valias continued The Guidry Group’s contract into the 2007-2008 school year, he also invited proposals from community groups for mentoring programs, after-school programs and Saturday extracurricular activities in order to change the educational climate and make the schools less prisonlike. He also plans to limit high school and classroom sizes, end disciplinary expulsion, and give students a boxed meal to take home.

“The other day we had children break into one of our schools,” Valias said while speaking at a New Orleans community forum in August 2007. “They were looking for something to eat.”