Houston-area school districts have really answered the call to welcome Hurricane Katrina evacuees and as we know from local news headlines, it hasn’t always gone smoothly.
Well, here are some nice stories from HISD, of HISD students doing what they can to bring Christmas cheer to evacuee students.
And on a related note, a Chronicle story today has some details of Katrina’s impact on HISD:
Harris County schools have scrambled to absorb roughly 20,000 students from New Orleans.
HISD has taken in the bulk of those, some about 5,763 evacuees. An additional 2,800 are attending Alief schools.
“It is costing us about $180,000 a day to educate the evacuees, and while we are honored to help, we have not gotten one dime of support from the federal government,” HISD spokesman Terry Abbott said. “The taxpayers of Houston are bearing all of the cost of this humanitarian educational effort right now, and we need FEMA and the Congress to step up and fulfill their responsibility.”
