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Thursday, September 8, 2005
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As a Community College in Mississippi Digs Out, Staffers and Students Look to a Difficult Future
Life Goes On: Miles From Home, Tulane Officials Worry About Admissions, Fund Raising, and the Mail
Stronger Hurricanes? Researchers Debate Whether Global Warming Will Make Storms More Destructive
Katrina Update: Announcements from colleges, associations, and government agencies.
Forum: Discuss the effects of the hurricane and exchange information.
Philanthropy: Donations to Hurricane-Relief Efforts Exceed $500-Million
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As a community college in Mississippi digs out, staffers and students look to a difficult future
Life goes on: Miles from home, Tulane officials worry about admissions, fund raising, and the mail
Stronger hurricanes? Researchers debate whether global warming will make storms more destructive
House-passed bill would let displaced students keep Pell Grants; debate looms over other relief measures
Higher-education bill in Senate would direct savings to deficit reduction and 2 new grant programs
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Information Technology
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of what freedom means
Hurricane winds tore the roof off this arts classroom building at Mississippi Gulf Coast Community College at Perkinston. The building will now have to be demolished. (Photograph by Rachael A. Bolden, Mississippi Gulf Coast Community College)
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Mississippi Gulf Coast Community College's administrators, employees, and students are beginning to pick up the debris of their campuses, homes, and lives after Hurricane Katrina plowed through this state just over a week ago.
Classes are scheduled to resume on Monday, exactly two weeks after the storm came ashore, at the four campuses of Mississippi's largest community college, which had enrolled about 10,500 students for this fall.
The institution's campus here, 30 miles north of the coast, and its Gulfport campus, near the beaches hardest hit, suffered heavy structural and water damage, totaling an estimated $15-million. Crews from a disaster-recovery company in Texas that the college hired two days after the hurricane hit are at work, tearing out waterlogged carpets and ceiling tiles, repairing roofs, and chain-sawing tree limbs.
Administrators said they would not be surprised to lose a couple of thousand students. They have already transferred some students who are temporarily living elsewhere to online courses for the fall.
If enrollments do drop, the loss of tuition and fees -- revenue that makes up more than one-third of the college's $70-million budget -- would be one financial hit among many the college expects to suffer. Another blow will come in the form of reduced support from state and county budgets, which are likely to be deprived of revenue from the damaged economy here and focused on a host of other needs.
State revenue from gambling taxes, as well as funds from individual income taxes and sales taxes, are expected to plummet. In later months, a construction boom might help soften the blow, state officials say.
Mississippi Gulf Coast's president, Willis H. Lott, said the college has insurance to cover the total replacement of buildings at a rate of $80 per square foot. The cost of repairing and replacing damaged structures, though, is now estimated to be closer to $140 a square foot. He estimates that the rate will rise with the costs of steel, cement, and fuel, which has been scarce here since the hurricane.
The college will have to use some of its reserve funds to cover the costs, Mr. Lott said. He is seeking help from the Federal Emergency Management Agency, from which he has also requested 150 units of temporary housing for his homeless employees. He also has assigned staff members to look for matching-grant programs that may be available from government and private sources. Offers to help have poured in from colleges across the country.
Repairing bricks and mortar isn't going to be the hard part, though, campus administrators say. The real challenge will be to help people restore order to their lives, and colleges like theirs are essential, they believe, in helping Mississippi's Gulf Coast region meet that challenge.
"Community colleges are so important to a community that's trying to pick up the pieces," said Colleen Hartfield, the college's vice president for institutional relations.
She believes two-year institutions like hers are especially critical in a state like Mississippi, which has a large proportion of low-income families and where 70 percent of all college freshmen start their postsecondary education at a community college.
With the hurricane destroying about 16,000 jobs at casinos and countless other positions in businesses along the Gulf of Mexico and inland, community colleges can help train workers for new careers and help people who have nothing left to begin making progress toward something, she said. Among other things, the college decided this week that it would add some short, nine-week courses this fall that students could take to get job training in certain areas, perhaps in construction, that would be in demand.
Going back to work also can help restore structure to college employees' lives -- something Ms. Hartfield knows from firsthand experience. A pine tree split her family's home here in half, she said, and the routine of work has been comforting.
Hurricane damage on the Perkinston campus of Mississippi Gulf Coast Community College included downed power lines, uprooted trees, and roof damage. This view shows the back of the arts classroom building. (Photograph by Rachael A. Bolden, Mississippi Gulf Coast Community College)
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Administrators estimate that as many as 150 of the college's 800 full-time employees have lost their homes. There is widespread concern that some of the 200 faculty and staff members who did not report to campus meetings on Tuesday may have died.
At the college's Jefferson Davis campus, in Gulfport, which is about a mile and a half north of the beach where some of the worst destruction occurred, only 84 of 200 employees showed up for Tuesday's meeting. So far college officials know of 31 full-time employees on that campus who have lost everything. One staff member who lost her home has been sleeping in her car.
A computer technician who lives in Pass Christian, Miss., has the only house standing in his neighborhood. Even though he has no running water, he has taken in many neighbors and even has people living in his horse trailer. On Tuesday, the technician was on the Gulfport campus, helping to restore the college's e-mail service.
On Wednesday, Trudi P. Mullins, the college's graphics-services manager, made it back to work here in Perkinston after spending the previous four and a half days trying to salvage what was left of her single-level home in Gulfport. The hurricane's storm surge pushed sewage-laden water as high as five feet in some parts of her house. Her car was completely submerged. She saved 10 percent, at best, of her belongings, she said, lugging them out of her home in a wheelbarrow.
But Ms. Mullins said she feels lucky because she is alive, has a place to live (with her brother, whose home nearby survived), and is back at work.
"This is your first step going back toward routine," Ms. Mullins said. "My brain and my heart were exhausted with going through just this constant waste of everything you've built in your life."
The day before, Janae Johnson, a freshman at the campus here, the college's only residential branch, pulled up to her dormitory to see what she could salvage.
Ms. Johnson's family home, in Pass Christian, is gone, wiped out in the storm, and she had come to collect more clothes and to check out what belongings she had left. In her room, she found her SpongeBob Squarepants pillow, her laptop, framed photographs of herself with friends, some compact discs, a bottle of Louisiana hot sauce, and more clothes than she had remembered. Those are now all her possessions.
Ms. Johnson, who wants to major in journalism, said she looked forward to resuming college. The students had taken one week of classes here before being evacuated.
"Maybe it will take my mind off a lot of the things that have been destroyed," Ms. Johnson said. She has not visited where her family's house once stood, and said she would not go back: "I might cry."
The community college is setting up a fund to help students and employees who have been affected by the hurricane. The institution is also seeking ways to help the community more broadly. In the days since the storm, the campus here has housed law-enforcement officers, power-company crews, and rescue workers. After the college's computer labs reopen, officials plan to hold sessions where people can learn how to file insurance claims.
When classes resume next week, campus officials are not sure how many faculty members or students to expect. Some employees may not be able, or may not want, to return to work. In addition to those whose homes are damaged, employees who are parents will have a hard time finding child care as long as the public schools in the area remain closed.
Cheryl Thompson-Stacy, the college's vice president for academic instruction and student affairs, said she had fielded offers from professors elsewhere in the country who have offered to teach courses online, to fill in gaps if some faculty members cannot return for the fall semester. She may accept some of those offers, she said.
Getting back to some semblance of normal is simply going to take a lot of flexibility from everyone at the college, Mary S. Graham, vice president for the campus here, said in remarks to faculty and staff members who gathered on Tuesday.
"You may have a Ph.D.," she said, "but we may need you to mop the floor this week."
Background articles from The Chronicle:
- In Desperate Evacuation of Hospitals, Medical Workers Kept Patients Alive While Researchers Euthanized Lab Animals (9/7/2005)
- Tulane U. and Loyola New Orleans Close for the Semester; Other Gulf-Area Colleges Reopen This Week (/daily/2005/09/2005090602n.htm)
- Bus Convoy Rescues 400 Students From Xavier U. of Louisiana (/daily/2005/09/2005090201n.htm)
- A Grim Picture Emerges as Colleges Begin to Assess Hurricane Damage (/daily/2005/09/2005090101n.htm)
- In Wake of Katrina, Colleges Face Host of Insurance and Facilities Problems, Experts Say (/daily/2005/09/2005090102n.htm)
- Colleges Near and Far Offer Help to Campuses Stricken by Hurricane (/daily/2005/08/2005083101n.htm)
- Hurricane-Lashed Campuses Across the Gulf Coast Region Will Remain Closed for Days (/daily/2005/08/2005083003n.htm)
- With Hurricane Bearing Down on New Orleans, Orientation Turns to Evacuation (/daily/2005/08/2005082901n.htm)