N.O. Day Schools Back In Business

Four months after Katrina, one Jewish school reopens and another decides to resume in August.
The walls have been repaired and repainted, the floor tiles replaced and last Thursday the doors at Torah Academy, a Chabad-affiliated school that incurred an estimated $750,000 in capital losses as a result of Hurricane Katrina, reopened to welcome 28 students in nursery school through eighth grade.

Administrators at Torah Academy, located in the New Orleans suburb of Metairie, chose to resume classes, even though nearly half of its pre-storm student body would not be immediately returning.

“We just decided to go for it,” said Malkie Rivkin, the school’s Judaic studies principal, who at first worried that there would be too few students to sustain the academy.

At the nearby New Orleans Jewish Day School, the only other day school in New Orleans, initial surveys showing fewer than half of students would be returning in January led administrators to put off reopening until August. Before the hurricane and its devastating aftermath forced New Orleanians, including some 9,500 Jewish residents, to flee the city, there were 68 kindergarten-through-eighth-grade students enrolled at the transdenominational school.

Many of that school’s parents said they were unwilling to uproot their children — most of whom were attending Jewish day schools in Houston, Atlanta, Memphis and other cities where New Orleans families sought shelter from the storm — mid-school year, but planned to re-enroll their children there come August, said Hugo Kahn, the school’s board president.

“We hope that by the end of January or the middle of February, we’ll know how many students are coming back,” Kahn said, noting that decisions regarding staffing would be made shortly thereafter.

Extensive hurricane-related repairs to Metairie’s Jewish community campus, which houses the pluralistic day school, are expected to be complete by early spring. Repairs and content replacement at the community campus is expected to cost $1,800,000.

Two former New Orleans Jewish Day School students are now attending Torah Academy, Rivkin said.

At the academy, new and returning students will be participating in class discussions, art projects, and daily journaling on subjects ranging from loss to heroism, in order to encourage expression of their post-hurricane trauma. Students will also be writing letters to their former classmates who are attending schools elsewhere.

“Educationally, you can’t ignore the fact that their lives were turned upside down,” she said. “You have to let them talk.”