Displaced Students Return To La. for 2nd College Try
For Freshmen Who Fled Katrina, Feelings Are Mixed on Leaving Schools in D.C. Region

By Susan Kinzie
Washington Post Staff Writer
Tuesday, January 10, 2006

On Sunday, Florence Farris left her parents' home in the District and flew to Louisiana to start college -- again.

The day before her first class at Loyola University New Orleans in August, Farris was evacuated to a shelter in Baton Rouge. A week later, she was going through orientation at Georgetown University for a semester as a visiting student. And now she's back at Loyola, where classes resumed yesterday with a scaled-back staff and budget.

She is one of hundreds of New Orleans college students who were taken in at Washington area schools that scrambled to accommodate Hurricane Katrina evacuees. Now most of the students are returning to the South, trying to start over, much like the hurricane-damaged communities and their universities.

Some Gulf Coast campuses have patched up flooded buildings; some have found makeshift classroom space. But it won't be until later this semester, when schools see how much money they get for rebuilding -- and just how many of the tens of thousands of displaced students return -- that they'll really know what's ahead.

For Farris, it's an easy leap of faith. "Once the students come back, a lot of life is going to come back into the city," she said.

But some students aren't so sure, worrying -- along with their parents -- that their health, safety or the quality of their education would be at risk if they go back.

Some students uprooted by Katrina fell in love with their new campuses last semester or found themselves unexpectedly at their first-choice school. That's what happened to Ben Segal, a student from New Orleans who settled for Tulane University in his home town when he didn't get into the University of Virginia. He started classes at U-Va. after the hurricane, and in the past semester made close friends, pledged a fraternity and enjoyed the most challenging class of his life: single-variable calculus, which almost took him down.

In the fall, he signed a petition, and student government leaders asked U-Va. administrators to let freshmen displaced by Katrina transfer in.

Spokeswoman Carol Wood said the university was very clear when it took in the 140 students that they were expected to return to their original schools when they could.

Most Washington area colleges set strict policies for the visiting students, limiting transfers and not charging tuition. At most schools, not more than a dozen are expected to remain, although that number could be higher at Howard University, which took in 115 students and encouraged them to go back but waived tuition for the spring.

Terry Hartle of the American Council on Education said university administrators don't want to be seen as poaching students from the hobbled Gulf Coast schools.

"Not too many operations in the city have as much economic clout as the university," said Professor Richard Teichgraeber, who returned to Tulane from Washington and Lee University in the fall. He found a quiet New Orleans without its clattering streetcars, whole neighborhoods dark and a campus waiting for its students to return.

After Segal's last exam in December, he emptied his dorm room, turned in his key and went home to a strangely unsettled New Orleans.

"Nobody knows what's next," he said. "There's no sense of where the city's going from here."

At Tulane and Loyola, about 90 percent of students are returning. About three-quarters signed up this fall to return to Xavier University of Louisiana. At the much harder-hit Dillard University, 48 percent had come back when classes started yesterday, though they weren't on the badly damaged historic New Orleans campus; a hotel will serve as a dorm, faculty housing and teaching space this spring.

Some students couldn't wait to go back to New Orleans.

"I felt like I was cheated out of a semester of the college experience," said freshman Thomas Gibbs, who lived with his parents in Alexandria last semester, commuted to classes at Georgetown and missed months of workouts with the Loyola baseball team. "It was like being in high school again. . . . It was depressing."

Peter Lane, a freshman who had wanted to go to Georgetown for years but couldn't get in, said one semester there got that out of his system. "I have never worked so hard in my life," he said. "My brain was just in a coma afterward."

Farris is used to starting over, having moved every few years with parents who worked in the military and the Foreign Service. She was born in the District, lived in Bangkok for five years, then Hawaii, Jamaica, the District again, back to Bangkok, then South Africa and Paris.

Freshman year of college, the first chance at real independence, was a time she had been waiting for. "I was definitely ready," she said, "to have the ability to make my own decisions, to study and get into subjects I like, and also to goof off."

As Katrina barreled toward New Orleans, she had just met her roommate at Loyola, unpacked her dresses and swishy skirts, a favorite book by Salman Rushdie and DVDs such as "Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind." She planned to buy big rolls of paper to paint gold stencils on the room's walls and envisioned blue fabric billowing from the ceiling.

Instead, she emptied the refrigerator, grabbed her iPod and a few clothes in a small bag, padlocked the closet and evacuated. After she spent nights sleeping on a church floor without enough blankets and days volunteering for the Red Cross, the levees broke.

"All of a sudden, this traumatic upheaval," said her father, George Farris, "and she's back living with us again."

She enrolled at Georgetown, went to thrift shops to buy clothes and made friends. But it wasn't how she had pictured freshman year.

Instead of freedom on campus in outrageous New Orleans, she was in the small apartment her parents had moved into while repairs were underway at their house -- a place just large enough, they thought, with their daughter away at school.

They reimposed her curfew, usually midnight or 1 a.m. "That's when parties start ," she said.

She always knew she'd go back to New Orleans. The city needs people now, she said; besides, it's the life she had chosen for herself. She started a club, Wolfpack at Georgetown University, to help displaced Loyola students and to raise money for the school.

The first thing she'd do back in New Orleans, she said, was collapse onto her bed, just be alone for a minute. Then she'll take some new friends out to explore the awakening, uncertain city. They'll order coffee and beignets at Cafe du Monde and see what comes.