Background noise/voices
Female 1: When Katrina hit the lights went out and there was no electricity. My little cousin and uncle died. Two big oak trees fell on the house. I saw it crash as I was worrying about my own family. We went to a lot of other different places. I couldn’t tell you all because I forget so fast.
Female 2: When it happened, I felt something inside of me kind of crumbled up and just broke
Narrator: In the weeks and months after Hurricane Katrina and Rita unleashed their fury on the Gulf Coast, the region’s young people faced almost unimaginable losses. Homes and belonging were destroyed. Friends, neighbors, and family members were dispersed. Out of touch—gone. Some forever. Whole communities had disintegrated. And in many places, the pace of restoration was intolerably slow. But in the midst of this devastation, a seed has been planted. Students and teachers across the Gulf Coast are being engaged as contributors with important roles to play in restoring that which has been lost. It’s happening through a program called “The Gulf Coast WalkAbout”
Adrianne Sullivan: We’ve gone out into the community. We knock on doors. We introduce ourselves. We talk to people we wouldn’t normally talk to. We wave at people we wouldn’t normally wave at. You know, we’ve been helping out. The kids have been offering to help without us having to initiate a push, you know.
Narrator: From its inception in the summer of 2006, this program, designed by the National Youth Leadership Council, has made clear, that, even in the face of great adversity, young people have much to give.
Jeffery Saksa: You can touch people’s live with a cup of water—the generosity of being a friend—being a neighbor.
Narrator: By tapping the energy, ideas and capacities of students in grades 5 through 8, along with their teachers and college age volunteer leaders, the Gulf Coast WalkAbout has provided an extraordinary summer school experience for hundreds of students—an experience that merges community service with progressive strategy for enhancing curriculum-based learning.
Desmond Moore: WalkAbout Program is where service learning meets the curriculum. It’s where the projects and the events that you do in the community, meet literacy skills, meets environmental science, meets mathematics.
Narrator: While enhancing learning and building resiliency in the program’s young participants, the Gulf Coast WalkAbout, with major funding provided by State Farm, has also provided inspiration and much needed help for communities that were among the hardest hit by Hurricanes Katrina and Rita: Moss Point and Picayune, Mississippi, New Orleans, Louisiana, and Port Arthur, Texas.
Though damaged by Katrina, The Moss Point Oaks B & B hosted, at no charge, volunteer first responders during the first six-months of recovery.
Kim Brooks: The gardens were pretty much destroyed in Katrina. And then I contracted leukemia and was gone from December until about four weeks ago when I returned home. So everything was pretty much in disarray and I was out trying to get things looking nice again, and this wonderfully mannered group of kids came strolling down the sidewalk, as I was working out here, and they asked if they could stop and talk to me. I told them the gardens had suffered and explained, you know, why I was working so hard now.
Girl: We decided to plant aztec grass in Mrs. Brooks yard . My fellow classmates and I took it into consideration to call her and schedule a date and time to come and beautify her garden.
Kim: They put their little heads together and hopped back up about three minutes later and asked could they come and work in the garden as part of their community project which, of course, brought tears to my eyes.
Girl Student: She had great admiration for what we were eager to do and the group from the WalkAbout Program.
Narrator: The young people’s work grew from outdoor explorations and needs assessments of their community. From these neighborhood assessments, the students and their teachers created a project that addressed unmet needs stemming from the hurricane that fit within the general theme of oral history, environmental restoration and emergency preparedness.
Mary Williams: The children enjoyed the oral history report. They did their interviews and made it into a story form and presented those in class.
Narrator: Creating hurricane preparedness kits for children at a summer camp provided a valuable public service and a sense of empowerment for the students themselves, who must be ready to face future storms.
Adrianne: These kids are really ready the next hurricane. They can tell you in a minute what you need: batteries, light, radio—they know it---they got it going on.
Narrator: The immense impact of the storms inspired environmental projects that improved conditions within the students’ neighborhoods, from planting trees and building birdhouses, to learning about the importance of preserving wetlands.
Mary: One thing that the children learned this summer about environmental restoration is to take care of what you have today because you never know when it will be taken away from you.
Jeffery: When we sit down and we teach them, we make a potted plant to go give to an elderly person to cheer them up, but yet, at the same time, they’re learning what’s in the minerals in the soil and what it takes for that plant to live.
Narrator: With care taken by the teachers to connect the project’s powerful life lessons with academic content in science, social studies, and language arts, Gulf Coast WalkAbout made learning relevant, exciting, and vitally important.
Joseph – Student: The biggest thing I learned this summer was how to sit down and analyze things before just doing it. How to sit down and think about it before taking action.
Cherelle – Student: What I learned more about my classmates is they can do things if they put their minds to it, and if they work together.
Christian – Student: I learned more about myself that I can help--that I am important—and that I can do whatever that I can do to make the town look better.
Narrator: In New Orleans, students also began their project with a neighborhood assessment.
Carl Alexis: It was about preparation. The kids understood it was their job to go out and assess the community.
Narrator: The urban landscape, devastated by Katrina and Rita, simulated a range of creative responses: Oral history projects, reading mentorships with younger children, the establishment of a literary museum, park restoration and gardening, and the construction of benches at a bus stop beside a nursing home
Desmond Moore: We’ve created two benches and a lot of algebra that went into creating those benches.
Carl: I think the WalkAbout has impacted my students’ learning because it has improved their knowledge of civic engagement, something that wasn’t as important to them before.
Carla Robertson: It doesn’t make sense to cram them into a room all day where they’re doing only pencil and paper work---where the audience is only the teacher. I think that’s the other thing that makes service learning so great. If you’re creating a product, it’s going out to the community. And that gives it meaning.
Ann Masten: There’s some pretty fundamental processes that you need to tap into, that help young people or are likely to help them recover and one of the most important—it gives them back a sense that they have some control over the world. And I think programs that are empowering young people, that try to build their leadership, which is at the very core and essence of what they try to do in the WalkAbout program, can play a very important role after everything has been taken away from them.
Desmond: I think the young people are definitely the key to rebuilding New Orleans. They don’t understand the light that they have. It liberates others to do things. It motivates others to get involved. It motivates others to want to achieve some things for the city, for the community, for themselves.
Ky’Ara: Me and my friends have been thinking that were going to start a service learning club or do other service learning projects like going out into the community or visiting elderly people in nursing homes
Leigh-anna: The only way our community is going to get clean is if we go out there and we do it. No one—the community is just not going to clean itself but we have to go out there and do it.
Adrianne: I, too, have learned that the students have more power than we give them credit for, and they have a lot more going for them sometimes. You know, as a teacher, you’re usually stuck in that mode to tell ‘em this-- they do this; tell ‘em something else; they do something else, where it should be more of a give and take situation.
Mary Beth Romig: Some kids here in New Orleans are coming forward now with suggestions of how they see the school system can be better, which is excellent. After all this is going to be their city.
Annissa: There are things that need to be done in the community, first about the kids. Because the kids come first. And I think that we need a Boys and Girls Club so that kids can stop running in the streets everyday and every night because it’s too dangerous.
Narrator: The Gulf Coast WalkAbout Program has demonstrated that when disasters strike, young people can thrive as contributors who have important roles to play in healing the people and rebuilding the communities that surround them.
Kids cheering