Neighborhood parent Maroy Merino was talking with J.L. Long principal Desiree Arias to brainstorm about ways to encourage more “community and teamwork” between our neighborhood’s cluster of public schools.
Topmost on their minds was the DISD mandate that will move feeder schools Lakewood, Stonewall, Mata and Lee elementaries’ current fifth-graders to sixth-grade at J.L. Long next school year.
“We were meeting to figure out ways for our kids to get to know each other before they get to sixth grade together in the fall of 2006,” Merino says.
By chance, the meeting was held right after Hurricane Katrina had hit the Gulf Coast.
“We were thinking of different things we could do, and we thought perhaps a service project,” Merino says. “And then we thought: ‘Service project? Oh my gosh — the hurricane!”
And thus began six neighborhood schools’ efforts — the four elementaries plus Long and Woodrow Wilson High School — to help those displaced by Katrina.
Like many in the neighborhood, they heard that St. Luke Community United Methodist Church on East Grand was a staging site for hurricane relief efforts, offering meals, hair cuts and a place for locals to donate items such as clothing, diapers, water, food, money and more.
“We met with them, and they gave a list of their immediate needs,” including monetary donations as well as gift, phone and gas cards and personal hygiene items, Merino says.
So donation sites were set up at each school in early September and, after the first week, the kids’ efforts were already a big success. Students at J.L. Long, for instance, donated $250 in the first four days alone, along with boxes full of toys, toiletries and gift cards.
It’s not hard for students to understand the need, Merino says, because those affected are attending their schools: All the schools were accepting enrollees from Louisiana, and a number of neighborhood families and teachers had family displaced by the storm moving in with them.
For instance, Merino’s sister, her partner and their two dogs and two cats are now bunked at Merino’s house.
The donation project, Merino says, will go on indefinitely.
“I think we’ll do it for awhile. We’re not gonna set an end date — we’ll just keep collecting as long as our kids keep giving.”
And the kids’ efforts, of course, aren’t going unnoticed.
Mary Koepp came to Dallas with her mother and two children, 7-year-old Anna Grace and 4-year-old Halle, to stay at her sister’s M Streets house after evacuating their Covington, La., home.
Though Covington, across Lake Pontchartrain from New Orleans, didn’t experience much flooding, there was still plenty of damage.
“It’s nothing like what you see in New Orleans,” Koepp says. “But we have trees down, trees in people’s homes, blocking roadways.”
Her husband, a police officer, stayed behind and is working 12-hour shifts seven days a week for the foreseeable future. Asked when she can go home, Koepp says: “My husband calls and gives us updates of when he thinks the power will be back on, and every time he says ‘about two weeks,’ so I really don’t know.
“I think that’s part what he hears and part wishful thinking.”
In the meantime, she says, Anna Grace has adjusted to her new school, Stonewall Jackson, and says she’s being treated well by new friends in the neighborhood. So well, in fact, she feels “a little guilty.”
“People’s whole lives have just been washed away. And I have a nice home to stay in now, and a nice home to go back to still.”
But she’s grateful for the efforts of those in our neighborhood who are doing what they can to help those most in need.
“It’s very nice,” she says. “Everybody’s been very nice.”
Merino says the kids have been happy to help. They’re taking turns dropping off donations at St. Luke’s, which, she says, is helping them “know that what they’re doing matters and that they’re part of a bigger picture.”
And, as for how the project has helped the cluster of schools build community?
“One of the wonderful by-products of working together,” she says, “is getting to know each other more.”
