New Orleans Times-Picayune Article

Fourteen-year-old Derricka doesn't want to go back to the New Orleans housing project where she lived before Katrina. Nor do her grandparents, who raised her in the St. Bernard complex. But on the news, I watch as politicians and activists suggest that we all work together to reopen them.

As an inner-city New Orleans public school teacher and native, I listen and talk back to the TV. Weren't we going to use Katrina's destruction as a chance to correct old problems? The plan was not to re-open public housing but redesign them into "mixed income units".

I met Derricka at the Astrodome in Houston, where she and her family were taking shelter and I was volunteering. The teenager is glad to be back in New Orleans, attending a charter school operating out of the YMCA. After a fruitless search for an apartment they could afford, and with no help from FEMA or other government agencies, the family decided to clean out the apartment of a displaced family member and live there temporarily, even though the water hadn't been approved as drinkable yet.

They liked the fact that the small apartment building was between duplexes - they felt they were in a neighborhood. But they're still looking for a permanent place to live.

While politicians argue about finances and engineers dissect our failed levees, thousands of poverty stricken New Orleans teenagers sink further into uncertainty, far from home in strange cities and foreign schools. They deserve our attention and our help.

Wade was born and raised in, and most recently rescued from, the "9th Ward." He almost drowned in his home after rescuers took his family but left him behind, then came back to find him unconscious. He's 15 years old, living in San Antonio, and he wants to come home.

But his mom says people should "use their heads and take the opportunity FEMA gave people by paying for their out-of-town apartments". She says, "We will live in San Antonio for 18 months. I can't come back because the house my family was renting is damaged and has no services." She used to live in the Florida projects and recommends not rebuilding them, but building doubles for low-income people instead.

Dwight and Dwan are 17-year-old twin brothers I met while teaching at Carver Middle School three years ago. After the flooding began, they waded in waist-high water from the Lafitte housing project to the Superdome, only to be sent to the Convention Center. After witnessing and experiencing things there that have changed them, they were bused to Fort Smith, Texas, and then to Kennett, Mo., where they now live.

Dwight and Dwan think their small-town school, which still practices corporal punishment, doesn't welcome them. They want desperately to come home and "stay in one of those FEMA trailers". Their mother loves her new townhouse in Kennett's projects, where black and white residents live together. She just got a job in a nursing home after she marched into the unemployment office and said, "I'm not leaving until you give me a job".

Unfortunately, the twins are less happy. They and three other Katrina evacuees dropped out after just three weeks in the school. Dwan says he left "cause he was suspended for something that another black student did. "They can't tell us apart here," he said. Dwight leaves cell messages telling me, "I want to come stay with you, and I'll work in New 0rleans". Dwan says he's "coming to get my own trailer and buying a bus ticket " as soon as he can get the money.

They read at a third-grade level, and have just about aged out of high school. We need to open an adequate nmnber of schools that will nurture and educate children like these so they can come home.

We need to make sure there is affordable, decent housing for their families here in the new New Orleans. These are our children. Like so many other displaced New Orleanians, they want to come home to what they know and love. Our leaders should place families like theirs on top of the agenda to make that possible.

Diana Boylston lives in New Orleans. Her email address is boylstonclark@cox.net