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No Time To Lose

In the aftermath of Katrina, corps members team with KIPP to create a Houston school for New Orleans evacuees - with dramatic results.

It was a rough start to the new school year. Most New Orleans schools had been in session for only a few weeks before Katrina devastated the city. Anxious and worried about their students-many of whom had been evacuated to the Astrodome and other shelters in Houston-28 displaced Teach For America corps members assembled in Houston to consider their next steps.

"I wanted to be a part of what needed to go on," says Kyle Shaffer (G.N.O. '05). "I just didn't know what I could do."

The answer came in the form of a proposition to corps members from KIPP Network co-founder Michael Feinberg (Houston '92). Did they want to create a school in Houston for Katrina evacuees?

"I read On Beyond Zebra by Dr. Seuss to them and told them this was an opportunity as much as a crisis, if we were willing to first think, and then act, beyond Z," says Feinberg, who-with the backing of Teach For America President Wendy Kopp and Teach For America - Greater New Orleans executive director Mary Garton-promised corps members that if they would commit to recruiting students and teaching in the school, he would take care of the rest.

The corps didn't think long before coming to a unanimous conclusion. "When all 28 of them said they wanted to start this school, we started to sprint," Feinberg recalls.

Within a couple of weeks, he had secured a building from the Houston Independent School District and an outstanding school leader, Gary Robichaux, principal of the closed KIPP Phillips Academy in New Orleans. NOW (New Orleans West) College Prep, a KIPP Transformation School, as the new school was named, would be a K-8 charter school specifically designed for Katrina evacuees. All but four members of the faculty were Teach For America corps members or alumni.

Now all they needed were students.

Every day for a week, corps members traveled to shelters around the city, including the Astrodome, talking to families and recruiting kids. "At first I wasn't sure how we would be received," Shaffer says. "I remember thinking, 'Should we even be in these shelters right now?' But the idea of the school sold itself. Every family I talked to was into it."

As the school's opening day approached, corps members prepared emotionally for their students' arrival. "It was really intense," says art teacher Laura Cornell (G.N.O. '05). "The kids were severely traumatized. A lot of them were taking buses from the Astrodome or other shelters directly to school, not getting enough sleep, not getting what they needed. So when they came to school, they weren't necessarily ready to jump into hard-core academics."

Yet, eventually, that's exactly what they did-with powerful results. According to the Stanford 10 tests given in November 2005 and April 2006, the school's students on average improved approximately 15 percentile points in reading and 27 percentile points in math against the national norm. Some of the most dramatic gains were made by NOW's sixth grade class, who tripled their reading scores and jumped from the 19th percentile to the 66th percentile in math.

"It was all about motivation and building relationships with the kids," says Robichaux, who, with his staff, worked hard to establish the positive culture and high expectations of the school. But the students' strongest motivation, according to Shaffer, was a desire to prove their own resilience. "It completely drove the whole year," he says, pointing to the feelings they expressed in diaries they completed for his writing class.

NOW College Prep will stay open for another full year to serve those evacuees who remain in Texas. In the meantime, Robichaux and several corps members and alumni have returned to New Orleans to launch another KIPP Transformation School, McDonogh 15. The new school serves about 450 students, including 45 who have returned from NOW College Prep. "Being in [Houston] and starting that school," says Shaffer, "it made me feel like there was no way I could not come back here and keep teaching."