A newcomer to the Charles H. Flowers High School varsity football squad ran curls and slants last week on a practice field beneath a dusty afternoon sun. He muffed one pass, caught two, queued up for more.
Marcus Nance again belongs to a team, a school, a community.
After Hurricane Katrina, Marcus and his mother, sister and two brothers huddled for days on a ramp outside the New Orleans Superdome amid chaos, random gunfire and corpses. His home was flooded, his school shuttered, his city ruined.
Now, Marcus finds himself at Flowers High in Prince George's County, one month after starting 11th grade in New Orleans. He is one of hundreds of students who have trekked from the Gulf Coast to the Washington area to restart a shattered school year.
The Katrina kids are flowing quietly into the region's schools, their numbers swelling day by day. Maryland and Virginia public schools have taken at least 1,488 evacuees, including more than 810 in the Washington area, education officials said yesterday.
The county school systems in Prince George's, Montgomery and Fairfax have enrolled 140 to 150 displaced students apiece. D.C. public schools have 35.
In addition, at least 92 evacuees are in area Catholic schools, and the Archdiocese of Washington is waiving tuition to ease hardship. New Orleans Archbishop Alfred C. Hughes last week visited six evacuees at Blessed Sacrament School in Northwest Washington. Fifteen students from a Jesuit high school in New Orleans are at the Jesuit-run Georgetown Preparatory School in North Bethesda.
These numbers pale next to the many thousands of students from southeastern Louisiana and Mississippi who are streaming into schools in such southern cities as Baton Rouge, La., and Houston. Educating them this year and rebuilding their schools will pose a massive financial and logistical challenge.
By contrast, Washington area school officials say they can easily absorb the evacuees who have arrived. Public schools expect government aid to offset the enrollment bump; the Bush administration is proposing to reimburse school systems up to $7,500 for each displaced student. The administration also is seeking to help families of displaced private school students.
Many of these students want only to blend into their new schools and shed the stigma of labels. They don't want to be known as homeless, displaced or evacuees. With little to identify them as out-of-towners save their regional accents, they are seeking to melt into classrooms and noisy hallways in the first weeks of the academic year.
Yet these newcomers are influencing school administrators, teachers and peers with a power that belies their numbers. They are walking emblems of survival.
"It touches you," said Flowers football Coach Michael Mayo. "How can it not?"
