Gulf Coast colleges are still feeling a pinch in enrollment, their futures uncertain, as a number of campuses face long-term challenges of not just restoration, but wholesale relocation. As LaRaye Brown reports, state and community colleges in particular have been forced to absorb major losses, and readjust their recovery and growth goals, as they hunt for and seek to fund new homes. Schools like the University of Southern Mississippi and William Carey University, Brown suggests, are on the path to breaking ground on new sites.
For others, including the Mississippi Gulf Coast Community College system, the estimated time to restoring pre-Katrina numbers and operations keeps stretching outward. With enrollment still down nearly 12%, state funding will decline by over $3.6 million, president Willis Lott said in the report. As a result, Lott estimated, the school enrollment numbers would not reach pre-Katrina numbers until 2014, rather than 2010 as originally projected.
Meanwhile, the AP's Sheila Byrd reports on a study by the Southern Education Foundation, finding "that thousands of Gulf Coast students are still displaced...and millions of dollars worth of school reconstruction projects remain unfunded," and that a "new response" by federal government is needed to address the needs of educational institutions including K-12 level as well as colleges.Among the study's key findings:
Displaced students re-enrolled in schools in 49 states, but a lack of adequate federal funding meant that schools with the greatest number of displaced students had insufficient classrooms, staff and supplies to support them. The report found that as many as 15,000 K-12 public school students and 35,000 college students in Louisiana and Mississippi missed school last year because of lingering problems associated with Katrina.
Only 2 percent of the federal government's hurricane-related funding went toward education recovery. While the costs of hurricane destruction in K-12 and higher education were estimated at $6.2 billion, only $1.2 billion in federal funding had been committed to restoring physical structures and property -- inadequate even with the addition of some local government and insurance funding.
Another problem observed by the Clarion Ledger's editors is more social and political, and insidious. In Immigrants feel fallout on Coast, reporter Julie Goodman describes how "gratititude has turned to spite" targeting the Coast's immigrant population, those who were on-hand to "brave storm-ravaged homes, working among the corpses of dogs, cats and humans and cleaning rotten food from refrigerators..." and now, having contributed so much to the recovery work, and put down roots with homes, schools and businesses, say they're "stared at in public, singled out by law enforcement and targeted by politicians on the campaign trail."
See the special section for more extensive coverage and commentary related to the Katrina anniversary in Mississippi.
