Bush Addresses Gulf Coast Graduates

At Mississippi College Commencement, President Praises Students' 'Resilience'

BILOXI, Miss., May 11 -- This wasn't quite the way students from Mississippi Gulf Coast Community College envisioned their graduation a year ago.

The arena is partially gutted, and the sun peeks through one slice of the roof yet to be repaired. A hotel next door remains abandoned long after monster waves slammed a casino boat into it. And nearly a third of the students once here never returned.

Yet President Bush flew here Thursday not to mark loss but to celebrate survival, nine months after Hurricane Katrina devastated this swath of the South. Before an assembled crowd of 660 graduating students and thousands of relatives and friends, he applauded their fortitude in the face of disaster and their resolve to rebuild communities reduced to rubble.

"I am proud to stand before some of the most determined students at college or university in America," he told the crowd in Mississippi Coast Coliseum. "Over these past nine months, you have shown a resilience more powerful than any storm. You continued your studies in classrooms with crumbling walls. You lost homes and slept in tents near campus to finish courses."

He added: "You have sent a message to our nation and the world: Mississippi is coming back, and it's going to be better than ever before."

But Bush's trip here, his 10th to Mississippi since Katrina, highlighted how much remains to be done. Residents are still waiting for insurance to compensate losses.

Bush's motorcade cruised down the coast past a tableau of shredded buildings and uprooted trees. "It doesn't look much different now," said Charles L. Sullivan, the college's archivist and the author of a book on hurricanes that have hit the Mississippi Gulf Coast. "Nothing has really happened. It looks like the same except the debris has been removed."

Sullivan said Mississippi has been overshadowed by New Orleans, even though it suffered enormous damage: "I have no problem with New Orleans getting a lot of attention. But we were blown to bits." Bush's visit, he added, has provided a burst of optimism that more will be done. "It is a ray of light and hope, I'll tell you that."

Rep. Gene Taylor (D-Miss.) of Bay St. Louis said some agencies, such as the National Guard, have performed admirably but others, particularly the Federal Emergency Management Agency, have failed to effectively help the area. "It's a mixed bag," he said. "I'm not going to say everything was done poorly." But "my home community is actually worse than what you're seeing."

Founded in 1911, Mississippi Gulf Coast was the state's largest community college until Katrina slammed into its campuses in August. At the Perkinston campus, the hurricane blew away one building and so ravaged another that it had to be torn down. "I saw the Smith Building disintegrate before my eyes," Sullivan said.

The college sustained $17.5 million in damage, according to Colleen Hartfield, chairman of the graduation committee. It reopened 17 days after Katrina, but 3,000 of its 10,500 students never came back. "It's been an unprecedented year in the life of our college," said President Willis H. Lott.

No other U.S. president has given a graduation speech at a community college. Lott (who is not related to Mississippi's Republican senior U.S. senator, Trent Lott) invited Bush last October.