Separate but Equal?

Over the past two weeks, Texas education officials have enrolled more than 40,000 displaced students, almost all of them from the New Orleans region. New teachers have been hired, new textbooks ordered and entire school buildings taken out of mothballs. Like other states, Texas has integrated the Katrina victims into its schools, following strict federal guidelines that bar local school districts from educating homeless students separately from the general population or stigmatizing them with special identification cards or wristbands.

But on Capitol Hill, the Jones High School [cafeteria] fight has been used to justify an effort by the Department of Education and Sen. Kay Bailey Hutchison, R-Texas, to waive those federal rules. The sheer number of evacuated students needing new schools, say advocates of the change, has turned the federal homeless statute into little more than burdensome red tape. On Monday, Hutchison introduced a bill with Sen. John Cornyn, R-Texas, to allow school districts across the country to open separate schools for hurricane victims. The bill would take away the ability of evacuating parents to protest their children's placement in particular schools. It would also allow schools to issue "identification cards or other identifying insignia" for students affected by Hurricane Katrina. "Our top priority is keeping the kids from Louisiana in an environment that is safe, secure and familiar," said Chris Paulitz, a spokesman for Hutchison, who argues that in some cases evacuees might be better served by going to schools with other evacuees. "This is only a temporary waiver for the remainder of the school year."

But advocates for the homeless fear the waiver would relegate evacuated students to second-class status. "It basically allows schools to discriminate pretty broadly against kids who are homeless as a result of the storm," says Barbara Duffield, an advocate for the National Association for the Education of Homeless Children and Youth. The waiver would suspend parents' right to protest their children's placement, while making it easier for students to be moved during the school year or denied transportation, Duffield said. She calls the prospects of Katrina-specific school identifications "absolutely horrifying." "It's like a scarlet letter K or something," she says...

In Washington DC 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...

Brothers Eddie and Joshua Bloodwirt, 16 and 15 respectively, and their cousin James Sansone, 17, fled New Orleans and landed at a great uncle's house in Mitchellville after tortuous journeys, including a plane flight. James escaped before the storm, Eddie and Joshua days later, having slept on an elevated interstate highway and waded through miles of grimy floodwater. The lanky trio hope to try out for the Flowers basketball team. They said they've been treated somewhat like celebrities. Students will stop them, remark on their accents and ask whether they're from New Orleans. One girl cried upon hearing their story and offered unsolicited hugs.