Shaila Dewan’s recent article in the New York Times, Many Children Lack Stability Long After Storm, focuses on the lingering effects of Hurricane Katrina on children who were subsequently uprooted. The effects are more pervasive and devastating that commonly thought, with the problem all but vanished from the news cycle and political discussion.

BATON ROUGE, La. — Last January, at the age of 15, Jermaine Howard stopped going to school. Attendance seemed pointless: Jermaine, living with his father and brother in the evacuee trailer park known as Renaissance Village since Hurricane Katrina in 2005, had not managed to earn a single credit in more than two years. Not that anyone took much notice. After Jermaine flunked out of seventh grade, the East Baton Rouge School District allowed him to skip eighth grade altogether and begin high school. After three semesters of erratic attendance, he left Baton Rouge in early spring of this year and moved in with another family in a suburb of New Orleans, where he found a job at a Dairy Queen. A shy, artistic boy with a new mustache, Jermaine is one of tens of thousands of youngsters who lost not just all of their belongings to Hurricane Katrina, but a chunk of childhood itself.

Children, Law and Disasters

The Center for Children, Law and Policy recognized both the tremendous risk of fallout from Hurricane Katrina and the difficulty of knowing how to confront the issue and began a study that grew into a conference in 2007 and now a book, Children, Law and Disasters, that is being published by the American Bar Association this month. (The book can be pre-ordered through the ABA website).

Stability and Education are Key

As is pointed out in both the Dewan’s article and again and again in the pieces contributed by various authors in Children, Law and Disasters, the cornerstones of a child’s resilience in the aftermath of natural disasters are stability and education. The two are inseparable as a practical matter.

Following a disaster which has uprooted families and broken longstanding community connections, the most vulnerable are those without immediate access to the resources to resettle or the bureaucratic savvy to navigate the system. As the book points out, this takes place in a legal and social framework in desperate need of a child-centered approach. Our current policies are an unwitting investment in juvenile delinquency and crime that will be exponentially more expensive at that point in the not-so-distant future when it can no longer be ignored.

• Shaila Dewan, Many Children Lack Stability Long After Storm, New York Times, December 4, 2008
• Children, Law and Disasters, (Howard Davidson, Ellen Marrus, and Laura Oren, eds. 2008).
• Irwin Redlener, MD, Caroline DeRosa, and Rebecca Hut, Legacy of Shame: The On-Going Public Health Disaster of Children Struggling in Post-Katrina Louisiana, The Children’s Health Fund and the National Center for Disaster Preparedness, Columbia University Mailman School of Public Health (2008).

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