The Sunnyvale Sun

Cover Story

Photograph courtesy of Marjan Sadoughi

Sunnyvale's Taylor Smith tries to ready a New Orleans house that was damaged during Hurricane Katrina for a power wash. She wears a respirator to protect her from toxic mold growing on wood soaked by the floods.

Katrina Kids

Christa McAuliffe middle schoolers head south to help with ongoing clean up in the wake of Big Easy flooding

By JOANNE GRIFFITH DOMINGUE

It would be a trip to remember, and not because of long climbs to the top of the Washington Monument or the sight of moldering mummies at the Smithsonian Institute.

For these eighth-graders, this was not a trip to the nation's capital, but to the broken heart of Hurricane Katrina.

Sunnyvale's 13-year-old Taylor Smith donned a respirator and worked inside and outside a flood-damaged home. She raked weeds in the backyard, finding curtains and three rusty bikes with no wheels.

"There was more damage than we realized," she said, compared to what she and her friends had seen on TV.

Taylor's Cupertino classmate, Robert Rose, 13, raked through the overgrown weeds, too, battling poison ivy, avoiding poisonous spiders and swatting chiggers, tiny insects that burrow in under the skin, leaving swollen itchy bites.

Even with the heat and humidity, bug bites and moldy debris, "It was fun to work with my friends and know we were helping put [Katrina damage] all back together," Taylor said.

These teens, along with the rest of their class at Christa McAuliffe Middle School in the Cupertino Union School District, ended their three-week field trip to the South by helping with Hurricane Katrina cleanup near New Orleans.

The classmates planned their over-the-top three-week trip all by themselves. In New Orleans, Rob Canali, 14, said he could see the waterline from flooding all the way up by the roof of the house. "The whole first floor was under water," he said. "The guy in the apartment next door on the second floor stayed the whole time and docked his boat outside his door."

Most of the homes the students saw were ruined. Only "piles of rubble" were left, Robert said.

The number of damaged cars he saw struck Shervin Nakhjavan, 14. "They were on treetops, on top of each other, upside down, and pretty much useless now." He noted "stolen license plates, smashed windows, no doors, open trunks, battered roofs." Like the houses, cars, too, were ravaged by the floods.

Many of these eighth-graders have been together since kindergarten. Class field trips begin in third grade with just a night or two away. Last year's seventh- and eighth-graders went to Canada for a two-week trip. This year, the students went all out as they planned their three-week journey to the South.

How it started

They began thinking about it a year ago, "before Hurricane Katrina happened," said Leore Benchorin, 13. "We wanted to visit the South because it is a different culture, a different part of the world."

The trip initially did not have a Katrina component. That evolved during the planning.

Starting out March 21 in St. Louis, Mo., the trip concluded April 11 in New Orleans. Some call McAuliffe, an alternative school, the "field-trip school" and their teacher, Judith Barnes, the field-trip teacher.

Such trips are a part of the school's philosophy of hands-on learning. Marjan Sadoughi, a parent-chaperone on the Katrina trip, said McAuliffe believes in "the whole-child philosophy." While other schools put more stress on academics, she said, at McAuliffe, art, music and phys ed are equally important. Parent participation is required and students do not get letter grades.

The school values "life learning"--such as seeing the Katrina devastation first-hand--as well as academic learning. Everyone is on a first-name basis. The eighth-graders call their teacher 'Judith.'

What it cost

The parent group and faculty set a limit of $650 per student for a middle school field trip. A three-week trip would cost more than that. So Barnes held a class meeting to get the parents' approval.

The students set to work earning and raising money.

They held a class garage sale and raised $1,000. Some parents donated money. The final cost was $1,400 per student. Each student had to earn $100 toward his or her expenses. The amount could not be paid by parents.

Of the 31 students, 28 were able to make the trip.

"The kids plan it. They spend the whole year studying the place and plan a route," Barnes said. She divided the students into groups and each group studied a different state along the itinerary: Missouri, Tennessee, Arkansas, Mississippi and Louisiana. Each team was responsible for one day.

The students dove into the planning, researching places online and by phone. When a student would place a call, as often as not the person called would ask to speak to the teacher. Barnes would come on and say, "I can give you my credit card, but I can't tell you what's happening, as it is not my trip."

Mode of transport

The students traveled and lived in a large, green bus known as the Green Tortoise. The company brought the bus to the school so the kids could look it over. They liked it.

Because the bus had made a trip to New Orleans transporting a cargo of food, the class was able to get a reduced rate, as it didn't have to travel from California to meet the kids.

"It's known as a party bus," Barnes said, chuckling. "The bus driver was good with kids."

The group flew on two airlines to St. Louis, the starting point, some using donated frequent-flier miles.

A high point for Taylor was learning about the Civil War, slavery and Mark Twain. She and her classmates noticed at campsites along the way that, even in today's South, the races remain distinctly separate.

Diana Dvorkin, 13, loved going to a catfish festival.

Sunnyvale's Megan Alvey, 13, had hoped they could meet up with other middle schools, but it didn't work out.

Math to go

The food budget was $8 per day per child. Each had $2 for lunch. They learned that $2 or even $4, when paired with a buddy, did not buy much.

They discovered if they got into groups of four to seven, and went to a deli, they could get a lot of good food. They were not allowed to buy soda, candy or junk food.

The teens slept on the bus or outside in tents where, said 13-year-old. James Hansen. "You'd wake up to hundreds of caterpillars. Interesting. And a spider that big ... ," he said, indicating a quarter-sized arachnid.

Not all were as entranced with spiders and caterpillars as was James. Lots of "yuks" and "eee-ewwws" greeted the description of caterpillars falling out of the trees.

There was snow on the ground at the beginning of the trip in St. Louis. But by the end, in New Orleans, it was hot, humid and in the 90s.

To help with the Katrina cleanup, the students made arrangements through Project HOPE: Health Opportunities for People Everywhere.

HOPE's mission, according to its website, is providing humanitarian assistance in areas of need. The McAuliffe students worked with Project HOPE in New Orlean's Ninth Ward.

A brush with the law

On their way into a flood-damaged neighborhood, police pulled over the big green bus and stopped it. "People were coming in on tour buses and looting," Barnes explained.

Heat and humidity complicated the cleanup effort. Aurielle Bush, 14, said it was hard work cleaning up Katrina debris. She shoveled lots of pieces of wall, took out a part of a fence in the backyard of a house and found "baby mice and a lot of stuff that made you think." Some beads, a driver's license. "You think of the people who don't have anything to come back to," she said, eyes sober.

Rachel Karagianes, 13, also was touched by the ravages of Katrina. On one pile of debris she found an algebra book and some knitting. Observing a group of children on the small students' first day of school, she said, "They didn't have pencils."

Aaron Gerston, 14, talked about the people they met along the way and how nice they were. When the kids suffered from their zillions of bug bites, "People at the campsites would share their lotions for the bites. And one night they gave us all soda."

"We ran toward it," one said. "No," another chimed in. "We charged."

Not only New Orleans

For some students, their favorite spot was the Rock 'n' Soul Museum in Memphis. They liked the singing and dancing. The bus went in for maintenance and dropped the kids off at the museum, which was fine with them.

Parent-chaperones accompanied the students on the trip, some staying for the whole three weeks, others coming for one or two weeks. Chaperones got as much out of the trip as did the students.

Tim Hoffman, a chaperone on every overnight since his daughter, Katie, was in kindergarten, said a memorable moment for him was the Civil Rights Museum in Memphis, located in the motel where Martin Luther King was shot.

"It was a very powerful thing," he said. The kids were somber as they looked around.

Hoffman is sad that this would be his last trip with this group of kids. He said they "worked together from the start. They took responsibility for the whole thing.

"You hear about kids who won't do this or that. But that didn't apply to this group." Everyone pitched in to help with dishes and other chores, unselfishly sharing dwindling hot water with each other. If there were "issues," Hoffman said the students were quick to support each other.

"The whole trip was incredibly smooth," he added, giving much of the credit to the classmates. He loved watching them grow in their willingness to assume responsibility and said, now that they're home, the experience has left them much more confident in their abilities.