Katrina’s Kids

On Thursday, President Barack Obama was scheduled to visit a New Orleans school that was wracked by Hurricane Katrina and reopened only after residents of the Ninth Ward put in a lot of work. By day's end, he planned to leave. Critics and local officials have been quick to slam Obama for making such a brief visit. But the president doesn't need to be on the ground in New Orleans for long. "He's going there to make a statement, and he doesn't need more than a day to make it," says Irwin Redlener, president of the nonprofit Children's Health Fund and commissioner of the National Commission on Children and Disasters, a bipartisan panel appointed by the president and congressional leaders.

The more important statement Obama will make won't come in the form of a speech, and it won't be made on Thursday. It will consist of what his administration actually does over the next three years for the Gulf Coast's population, especially its children, who are still suffering mightily. "Kids get a lot of lip service in disaster planning, but they tend to get far fewer resources than they need," says Redlener. "The mantra of 'children are our most valuable resource' is almost never matched by actual funding."

Certainly, that's been the case in the gulf since Katrina. After years of bureaucratic haggling, recovery efforts are starting to get some momentum and some cash—Obama's administration has allocated more than $1 billion in aid for Louisiana alone. But "thousands of families have been falling through the cracks because it's been such a disorganized and disrupted safety net," says Redlener, who briefed the president's recovery team at the White House on Tuesday. "There's just too many of them in the gulf now who are still waiting for something to happen."

Redlener estimates that 20,000 Louisiana children "remain at some serious level of uncertainty with respect to stable housing and access to essential services." Researchers at Columbia University's Mailman School of Public Health, where he teaches, have been tracking thousands of people displaced or otherwise affected by the storm, and they've found that constantly shifting policies over the past four years—particularly with regard to housing—have left the storm's victims emotionally and financially adrift. "Every time we go and talk to these families, they're not sure which policies apply to them or what the deadlines are," says David Abramson, director of research at the National Center for Disaster Preparedness. "They'll be told, 'You have to move out of this'—a hotel, a FEMA trailer, an apartment, wherever they're staying—and then the deadline will be extended, and then later they'll really have to move, and then it all happens again. It's hard to plan what's going to happen with their lives when they keep getting buffeted like that."

The constant uncertainty is a particular problem for kids, who need stability far more than adults do. "When you compare these displaced kids living in unstable housing to those who have found stable housing, they're almost twice as likely to perform poorly in school," says Abramson. His team has found that a third of the Katrina kids in middle or high school are at least one grade behind where they should be, compared with the area's pre-Katrina rate of 18 percent. Many of the kids have been shuffled around to new schools and then pulled out. Joy Osofsky, a professor of pediatrics and psychiatry at Louisiana State University, says she's interviewed kids who have been enrolled in as many as nine different schools in four years. And almost all the Katrina kids are in overcrowded classrooms. (The school that Obama is visiting is one of just five to reopen in the area.) None of this bodes well for the kids' future, says Redlener: "There's only so much academic disruption that a young child can deal with before he just can't catch up."

The Katrina kids' health is suffering along with their academics. Last year Redlener's team reported some shocking numbers from the field: 41 percent of the poorest displaced kids were anemic, 42 percent had respiratory problems that might be linked to formaldehyde in FEMA trailers, and more than half had mental-health problems. Ronald Kessler, a professor of health-care policy at Harvard University who is tracking a much larger group of families affected by the hurricane, says that among adults affected by Katrina, "the rates of PTSD [posttraumatic stress disorder] are much higher than those in your garden-variety disaster. Compared to anything in living memory in the U.S., they're off the charts." Kessler's latest research focuses on children. In an upcoming article in The Journal of the American Academy of Child & Adolescent Psychiatry, he reports that 9.3 percent of kids in hurricane-affected areas have a "serious emotional disturbance … that is directly attributable" to the storm. Osofsky, the Louisiana State professor, says she's seen even higher percentages in heavily affected parishes.