Libraries Rebuild After Hurricane Katrina

Outside the Houston Astrodome, a shelter for thousands of Hurricane Katrina survivors, about 300 children waited to board a convoy of yellow buses on September 8. With anxious parents offering last-minute hugs and a few tearful good-byes, it wasn’t just any first day of elementary school. There were relief workers, government officials, and journalists looking on as these children, among the smallest refugees of the disaster, went to school for the first time since the August storm obliterated their homes and much of the Gulf Coast.

The youngsters, primarily from the New Orleans area, traveled to Frederick Douglass Elementary School in Houston’s inner city, while another 160 kids from the George R. Brown Convention Center, another haven for hurricane survivors, attended Houston’s J. D. Ryan Elementary. Both schools, closed last spring due to declining enrollments, have been dusted off and pressed into service by the Houston Independent School District (HISD), which has so far absorbed more than 3,000 evacuee children, says HISD spokesman Terry Abbott.

Although library materials at Douglass and Ryan were dispersed after the schools’ closure, the new students aren’t without books, says James Hundemer, HISD’s manager of library services. After putting out a call for materials to HISD’s vendors, as well as to the Texas Library Association, the district received close to 60,000 donated books from across the country in two days. HISD staff is in the midst of sorting the mix of titles, mostly new books for all grade levels, Hundemer says. They will then be shipped to district librarians, with specific instructions to get them into the hands of relocated children. “The good citizens of this country have entrusted me to distribute these books,” he says.

Indeed, where the federal government may have been slow to act during the disaster, the public response, particularly by the library community, has been immediate and overwhelmingly generous, says Jason Jackson, a special projects officer at Miami University Libraries in Oxford, OH, who was so moved by television coverage of the devastated Gulf region that he launched the Geaux Library Recovery Project (GLRP) (geauxlibraryrecovery.blogspot.com), a blog for library professionals interested in assisting their beleaguered colleagues. GLRP initially helped secure medical references for doctors working at field hospitals in the Gulf area, but has since evolved into a larger grassroots network, linking school and public libraries from around the country and beyond in the effort to provide financial and material support to the region.

When the Louisiana Library Association posted an online request for extra computers in affected public libraries, they received 150 donations in a single day, enough to satisfy their need, says Louisiana state librarian Rebecca Hamilton. The association is accepting donations for Louisiana public libraries (www.state.lib.la.us), but it is still impossible to assess their material needs at this time because of power and phone outages, she says. At press time, at least four out of 15 Jefferson Parish libraries were completely destroyed, as were six in New Orleans. In Plaquemines Parish, two libraries still have water up to the roof. “And we’re still not being allowed into these parishes,” Hamilton adds.

In addition to its Web page on Katrina resources (www.ala.org/ala/cro/katrina/katrina.htm#help), the American Library Association (ALA) has initiated an “Adopt a Library” program (www.ala.org/katrina/adopt), in which ALA will collect information from libraries in need and connect them with others that can provide relief. While there is no coordinated relief effort specifically for affected school libraries, the organization can also match media centers in need with those that can provide assistance, says ALA spokesperson Larra Clark.

For their part, employees of the Rapides Parish Library, four hours north of New Orleans, have taken storm refugees into their homes, fed people who hadn’t eaten in days, or simply held a hand. All this in addition to providing valuable library services throughout the ordeal, says Beth Vanderstein, Rapides’ assistant director.