Weekly Column of Senator Lamar Alexander - Helping All Katrina's Displaced Children

Weekly Column of Senator Lamar Alexander - Helping All Katrina's Displaced Children

Hurricane Katrina displaced over one million people, at least 20 times more than in any other disaster handled by the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA). Three hundred and seventy-two thousand of those displaced by Katrina are school-aged children in kindergarten through the twelfth grade.

As chairman of the Education and Early Childhood Development Subcommittee, I held a hearing last week to determine how we, at the federal level, can help these 372,000 displaced school children.

Public schools by law have to accept all children. And Tennessee's public schools have made room for more than 3,000 of Katrina's displaced school children. Our public schools have been greatly helped by private schools that don't have to accept anybody. In Tennessee, private schools have accepted at least 400 students and probably more.

In Memphis, where so many displaced students have gone, the willingness of private schools to accept these students is a huge help to overcrowded public schools. The Memphis City schools have enrolled over 650 students and the adjacent Shelby County public school district has enrolled over 600 new children, a difficult burden in a school system already growing by 1,000 students and one new school building each year. The Memphis Catholic Diocese has enrolled over 250 students to help share the load.

These private schools in Tennessee and elsewhere that reach out are filling a huge need because the four Louisiana parishes hit the hardest had nearly a third, or 61,000, of their 187,000 students in private schools, according to the U.S. Department of Education.

I think that as we in the Senate decide how to respond to Katrina we'd be wise to follow the example of the people back home.

In Maryville, Al Gore flew a planeload of evacuees from New Orleans into one of Tennessee's most Republican counties. Nobody asked about anybody's politics. Everybody just pitched in to help.

Members of the church where I am an elder, Westminster Presbyterian Church in Nashville, sent $80,000 and a truckload of clothes and Clorox to southern Mississippi. "The Presbyterians are here," one grateful Mississippi man relayed to his friends on his cell phone to say, "and they have Clorox." When the Clorox was passed out, nobody asked if anybody was a Presbyterian.

And a headline several Sundays ago in the Tennessean was "Private Schools Welcome Those Displaced by Katrina." According to the newspaper, "a growing number of private schools in Middle Tennessee ... have volunteered to help students displaced by Katrina. Many of them are also waiving or drastically discounting tuition and fees for these students and some also accept evacuees from public schools."

That was the story and the lesson from Tennessee. The story in Washington, unfortunately, has been different. According to the Washington Post, when President Bush proposed emergency disaster legislation that would help all of Katrina's 372,000 displaced children during the rest of this school year, the senator from Massachusetts and some teachers' unions objected.

Senator Ted Kennedy said, "I am extremely disappointed that [the president] has proposed this relief using such a politically charged approach. This is not time for a partisan political debate on vouchers."

I absolutely agree with that last sentence. This is not the time for a partisan political debate on vouchers. This is the time for those of us in the Senate to do what Tennesseans and Americans all across our country are doing: opening our arms and asking what we can do for help—for all displaced children, not just some children.

I propose that we give the money for education to the states, and let that money follow students who have been displaced by Katrina to any accredited school - public or private - that they attend. The purpose here would not be to create a big new voucher program. Rather, this would be a one-year, temporary solution for every child that's been affected. That strikes me as the fairest approach.

At the end of World War II, a grateful nation enacted the GI Bill giving veterans scholarships for college. A lot of veterans had these vouchers for college, but no high school degree. So thousands of veterans took their GI vouchers to Catholic high schools to earn their high school diploma. That did not create a big new voucher program for high schools, and this won't either. This is a one year disaster relief program for kids from the Gulf Coast who need help.

I hope that my fellow members of Congress don't argue about old ideologies and leave these displaced children standing on the levee because the doors that are open to them for this one year happen to be those of a private school.

The public schools are brimming over. They need help from private schools. I hope those who are objecting to helping all displaced school children will think again. We can have our debates about vouchers next year when the floodwaters subside and the schools are open again. Right now we need to be throwing out every lifeline that we can—for all of Katrina's displaced school children, not just some.

If the Senate follows the example of Tennesseans, we'll worry less about which school these students attend and more about how we can help them get through this tough time.

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