A New School Year, a ‘New Normal'

Mercy Corps helped replenish some classroom materials pre-K teacher Dinah Thanars lost as a result of Hurricane Katrina. Photo: David Shafer/Mercy Corps

Slidell, Louisiana - The only thing Tish Casey tried to retrieve from her ruined pre-K classroom was a rocking chair. It was her grandmother's rocking chair, and Casey, 54, had wanted to give the chair to her own grandchild, expected in April.

But when Hurricane Katrina tore through here, Brock Elementary was one of the buildings soaked in its wake. So the rocking chair, along with teaching materials Casey accumulated over a 25-year career, lay ruined.

Dinah Thanars's pre-K classroom is also gone. A portable unit, the hurricane lifted it off its foundations and flung it aside.

"I don't know if it floated off, or was blown off, but it's of no use now," said Thanars, speaking outside the intact pre-K classroom that she and Casey now share, in nearby Florida Avenue Elementary. Thanars also lost everything on the first floor of her home.

Thanars and Casey, as most teachers do, have spent years collecting the kinds of materials that help them reach their students: games, books, math manipulatives. Many of these things are specific to the individual teacher - the picture book that can calm an unruly room at the end of the day, or the dreamed-up and cobbled-together puzzle that can make a five-year-old grasp the difference between round and square.

"It was either in my classroom or in my garage. So it's all gone now," Thanars said.

Mercy Corps was able to restore some of those classroom items by delivering 40 Teacher's Kits and 900 pre-K Children's Kits in time for the school year. Each Teacher's Kit contained a white board, flip chart, magic markers, push pins and other supplies. The pre-K kits - which were divided into two age groups, birth to 2 1/2 years and 2 1/2 to 5 years - held stuffed toys, games, books, crayons and drawing papers.

The deliveries sent thrills down the hallways of parish schools - and prompted a heartfelt e-mail from one of the district's pre-K administrators.

Child experts at Bright Horizons Foundation worked with North Carolina-based Kaplan Early Learning Company, a leading supplier of educational toys and materials, to determine the kit contents. Within two and half weeks of being contacted by Mercy Corps, Kaplan had sourced, purchased, assembled and shipped more than 56,000 kits to the Gulf Coast.

"When those came in, I started to cry," said Casey. "So often reach for something I used to have in my class, and then I think, Oh, I guess I'll have to buy that again."

Thanars recalled that, in what everyone now thinks of as ‘Before The Hurricane,' she had requested a white board like the one Mercy Corps included in the Teacher's Kits.

"Now I've finally got one," she said, laughing the bittersweet laugh that so many in the Katrina zone find they need to keep going.