Come Home to Delgado

Gwen Bouttè was going about the business of improving her job during the summer of 2005. Gwen is the Director of Admissions & Enrollment Services at Delgado Community College. Delgado Community College is in New Orleans.

Florence Kizza

Delgado prepares students for the local workforce or for transfer to one of the four-year colleges in the New Orleans area and has done so for 85 years. "The fall semester was going to be record enrollment with 17,500 on seven campuses," says Bouttè.

"I needed to track my communications with applicants and students better. Our current system was not allowing me to follow through from their initial contact through enrollment." She and her staff were calling prospective students and sending mail, but they had no way to determine how effective their efforts were. "We were kind of operating in the dark and reluctant to stop any of it," she continues.

Bouttè received a grant to purchase software from Education Systems called EMAS Recruitment Pro, and it came with a tele-counseling component. Bouttè was excited about the opportunities the software provided, particularly the personalized phone calls that her staff would be able to make to students.

A few days after a team from Education Systems traveled to Delgado to install the system, Hurricane Katrina hit. The campus was devastated, and the new Recruitment Pro system was useless.

"A week later our chancellor established an emergency command center in Baton Rouge, Louisiana, which is 90 miles from New Orleans," Bouttè recalls. The IT staff, escorted by the Louisiana state police, retrieved their servers from the second floor of the IT building in otherwise-unreachable downtown New Orleans. They set them up in Baton Rouge.

Two weeks after Katrina, a core leadership team was established in Baton Rouge . A call center was established and advertised as a point of contact for students, faculty and staff, many of whom had lost their homes in New Orleans and were living in Baton Rouge hotels or with family members there.

The task force of key administrators met twice a week. Input from his recovery team was viewed as essential by a chancellor concerned with recovery and rebuilding. "We stayed in Baton Rouge until October," Bouttè recalls. Then we relocated to our campus on New Orleans' west side, which suffered wind damage but no flooding."

The "Come Home" campaign

The staff looked ahead to the spring semester. They set up tents on the main campus and powered up wireless laptops, since the buildings were inoperable. When residents returned to the area to inspect their homes, they were told that Delgado would be reopening in January 2006. This began the "Come Home to Delgado" campaign.

To get the word of the reopening out, Delgado's chancellor went on every talk radio station in Baton Rouge. Faculty and staff put up signs and set up information tables in malls and other stores as far as 90 miles away from New Orleans. They handed out fliers at Krispy Kreme at six in the morning and put signs on their own cars. "Half of my staff couldn't come back to New Orleans yet, so we asked faculty and staff who lived close to commute to assist," says Bouttè.

Delgado also relied on the internet. Faculty members could teach classes online even though they were not back in the city. In cooperation with the Sloan Foundation and the Southern Regional Education Board, during October Delgado offered 5,000 online courses to 2,000 students. Next semester, some 25 to 30 percent of students took their classes online.

And for the spring 2006 term, ten thousand students enrolled for classes. "Come Home Delgado worked. The reputation of our college helped us also," says Bouttè. "After 85 years, we are the community college flagship of Louisiana. People looked to us to help with normalcy following Hurricane Katrina. That's what we helped provide."

A gift of communication

Near the end of January, Education Systems contacted Ms. Bouttè with an offer of help.

"After Katrina hit there were no phones to call or mailboxes to deliver mail to," explains Lisa Pieterse of Education Systems. "Potential students had no customary way of communicating with Delgado."

"The whole scheme of things changed," Bouttè comments. "Now we couldn't do the mailings or use the tele-counseling for which we bought the Recruitment Pro solution." They needed to communicate online. We had an excellent website, but we had to be able to capture more information from displaced students," Boutte adds.

In March, Education Systems donated EMAS Online Pro software to Delgado. This $51,000 gift enabled Delgado to take their recruitment efforts online. "We now build a relationship electronically," says Bouttè.

People are coming back to town, and they want to continue their education at Delgado," says Bouttè. "We won't have large applicant numbers from right out of high school, because they're not in town. But our admission application is online, and we now offer so many classes online."

The school added more detail to their emergency response plan. In the process, they changed their emergency website suffix from .edu to .com and gave key administrators cell phones with an area code outside of New Orleans.

Though Delgado's campuses have all reopened, there is still a long way to recovery. Bouttè and her staff work in makeshift offices. "Our conference center is now a converted student services center," she says. "Everyone is sectioned off with curtains, and we don't have real walls. I don't even have a door anymore! We do the best we can with what we have."
 

When Hurricane Ivan hit Florida on September 16, 2004, it was a wake up call for Tom Macon. "Holy cow, the devastation that a hurricane wreaks is incredible!" exclaims the Midwesterner who had a home in Pensacola, Florida at the time. "My neighbors lost everything. Our parish lost everything. You evacuate and come back to amazing devastation. Our dock was gone; my friends' houses were gone."

Florence Kizza

Macon is CEO of Grantham University, an online institution with students in 50 states and 26 countries. Prior to Hurricane Katrina, the school was located in Slidell, Louisiana. Just after Ivan, Macon announced, "Guys, we have to do something." All university records were then digitized and stored on servers elsewhere. This action in 2004 saved Grantham's bacon when Katrina came in 2005.

In January 2005 Grantham began establishing a satellite campus in Kansas City, Missouri. "We agreed that if another hurricane happens, we'll have people who can operate everything temporarily from Kansas City," he says. "Just before Katrina actually hit we began conference calls three times a day. Everyone in Slidell had been excused to evacuate, so they were calling in from Georgia, Texas, even California. The satellite images showed Katrina. Finally I told our Slidell management team to report to Kansas City the following Tuesday, one day after Labor Day."

Arriving anew in Kansas City, 23 employees and their families were booked into hotels that Grantham had readied. During the next few days, the reality of the situation began to sink in as they watched New Orleans on the news. Many of them soon learned that they had lost their homes.

Outreach begins

Grantham after Hurricane Katrina

"The team had packed only for a two day evacuation," Macon recalls. "But donations soon began flowing in. We had to rent four more rooms to hold all the donations. It looked like a mini department store!"

Employees continued to trickle up from Slidell. Eventually 60 families were living in the hotel, using 100 rooms. "Grantham University did everything possible to make our transition from a devastated Slidell, Louisiana, to Kansas City as painless as possible," says student programs coordinator Tina Taylor. "We were allowed the time we needed to take care of personal business with our homes and families."

Taylor and her daughter rode a bus to Kansas City. "Prior to Katrina, my work life was spent nourishing a newly formed team of student progress representatives. In my personal life, I was planning my daughter's sweet 16 birthday party. Who suspected such a drastic change? We lost everything in the hurricane."

Near the hotel, condominiums had just been built. Grantham rented condo units and furniture for displaced employees and paid their housing and utilities for six months. They even received move-in packages from Bed Bath Beyond that included irons, sheets, pillows, toasters and other household essentials.

Meanwhile, business continued at Grantham University. 

Grantham in Kansas City

In Part 1 of this story, Tom Macon, CEO of Grantham University, related the experience of moving Grantham from Slidell, LA, where their campus was destroyed in Hurricane Katrina, to Kansas City, MO. Here, he talks about establishing Grantham, an online institution with students in 50 states and 26 countries, as a Missouri institution.

Florence Kizza

Meanwhile, it was business as usual at Grantham University. "We got down to the temp facility and started to figure it out, quite frankly," says Macon. "We had a disaster recovery plan for how to get things cranked up in our facility, not in a new facility."

They rented space in an already furnished office suite, and Macon recalls numerous Staples runs to pick up paper clips, notepads and other office supplies.

Because their entire system was backed up and housed in locations outside of Slidell, school was able to continue essentially uninterrupted and "students were taking tests as the storm was hitting," says Macon. But even though all the data was unaffected and the systems were still up and running, the post office in Slidell was under water. "Our final exams are proctored and mailed in, and we didn't get them for months," says Macon. "We started to get the mail forwarded to Virginia and then to Kansas City. That's where the students were understanding. Some had to take whole tests over again because theirs were lost. They had to go through the whole process again, but they did it."

After the hurricane hit, Macon went down to Louisiana several times to meet with the governor, senators, congressmen and other people he could talk with about the state of the institution in Slidell. No one knew. Eventually they found out that the place where their facilities were had been condemned. "We couldn't have gone back anyway," says Macon. "This is now our campus. We're a Missouri institution and we'll stay a Missouri institution."

"There's varying stages of this," he continues. "Some wish us well, and others are hurt and angry. They ask, 'How come you guys haven't come back?' I try to address it honestly: we've made a variety of efforts, but there's so many unknowns. We can't.

We wanted to have a satellite campus and we're looking back to Louisiana for that. We've had some people lash out at us unfairly, and I know they're hurting. It's just unfortunate."

Grantham reached out to the employees who, for whatever reason, did not leave Slidell through the Grantham Employee Hurricane Katrina Relief Fund. Other displaced employees also returned to Slidell, and Grantham continues to offer support through temporary job hires and help with searches.

Forty-one employees moved from Slidell to Kansas City. Today, there are 220. "They truly are now the institution," says Macon of the new faculty members. "In less than a year, 175 people hit the track running, trained and got our mission and focus on our students. They have been able to sustain us and take us to the next level. It's been an amazing year, really just amazing people." And despite everything going on with its staff, enrollment at Grantham has risen in the past year. The 8500 students they had prior to the hurricane has grown to 11,000.

"A very good friend lost everything in Ivan," Macon says, "and they have just now torn down their house and are starting to rebuild. What does the future look like for the New Orleans area? They're in our prayers and we wish them the best."

Wave of Hope

Florence Kizza

"Katrina washed away many things, but we can't allow this disaster to bring further tragedy," said former president Bill Clinton. So Clinton joined with former president George Bush and the United Negro College Fund to launch the Wave of Hope campaign.

Thus began a fundraising initiative for the seven historically black colleges and universities affected by the storm — Alcorn State University, Bishop State Community College, Dillard University, Jackson State University, Southern University at New Orleans, Tougaloo College and Xavier University at New Orleans.

"Clinton and Bush asked us to spearhead this campaign, because they realize we have a stellar record in fundraising," says UNCF national director for communications and marketing Brenda Siler. "They came to us based on their knowledge of our history raising money and making good use of it."

After Katrina struck the Gulf Coast last year, UNCF began raising money for Xavier and Dillard in New Orleans and Tougaloo College in Jackson, Mississippi. The $4 million they gathered became the first resources for the schools as they waited for insurance money and funds from FEMA. It also provided 2,000 emergency scholarships for students of the three schools as well as those area residents attending schools in other parts of the country. Donors included JPMorgan Chase, the Newhouse Foundation and Dell.

Michel L. Lomax, president/CEO of UNCF flanked by former U.S. presidents Clinton and Bush.

"Now the schools are still in need of assistance," says Siler. "They've gotten money from FEMA and insurance companies, but it's not enough. More than $300 million will be needed to rebuild the campuses of the seven schools, and we are going to raise as much as we can."

Wave of Hope also includes scholarships for local families. "We came across a need that hadn't been articulated before," says Siler. "How do you keep the educational system going? Families will be impacted for a very long time, and they will continue to need financial assistance," Siler explains.

SUNO Rising

An image of a white bird flying through sunrays in a bright blue sky greets the person who visits the homepage for Southern University at New Orleans. "SUNO Rising!" it says. "On-ground and now Online."

Last year this time, neither was true.

Florence Kizza

After Hurricane Katrina hit New Orleans on August 29, 2005, SUNO set up shop in Baton Rouge at one of their four sister campuses.

"During that process we were reaching out to our family members across the country," says SUNO Chancellor Victor Ukpolo. "We sent the directors of admissions and retention on the road to Jackson, Miss., Houston, Texas, and Atlanta, Ga. to tell them that we'll be back in the spring. In January we came back and many of them came back with us. It was exciting. People rolled up their sleeves and were ready to work, doing things beyond their job descriptions."

SUNO, established in 1959, is part of the Southern University System, the only historically black university system in America. Ninety percent of SUNO's students qualify for some type of financial aid and last fall, they had about 3,500 students.

"After the storm everyone was scrambling to see what needed to be done," says Ukpolo.

Luckily, he had experience with this kind of thing.

"I came to Louisiana from California," he explains, "so I was familiar with the activity that took place at California State University, Los Angeles after the earthquake. I moved quickly and suggested that we needed to get in touch with FEMA to build temporary facilities."

The result of Ukpolo's quick thinking is 400 FEMA-provided trailer homes set up on SUNO's North Campus. The trailers are not only classrooms, computer labs, health and dining units and administrative offices; they are also housing for faculty, staff and students without homes, taking many of them out of the New Orleans Marriott Hotel. SUNO officially opened its temporary campus in February, but Ukpolo hopes to return to the main campus in the spring of 2007.

Chancellor Victor Ukpolo Southern University at New Orleans

After establishing shelter for those who could return to New Orleans, Ukpolo turned his attention to those who could not. "Out of 3,500 students, we came back in the spring with 2,100," he says. "As chancellor I felt for the 1,500 still out there and knew it was tough for them to come back. We didn't want to allow their educational journey to be interrupted."

So Ukpolo met with his staff. Prior to Katrina, SUNO had a hybrid approach to online classes, with limited offerings. Now, four degrees are available online. This is how many displaced students are taking classes.

Ukpolo is also calling back faculty and staff who are on furlough and is going on the road to meet with alumni around the country to talk about SUNO. "We've been getting a lot of help from our stakeholders who are concerned about the school's sustainability," he says.

SUNO is not only taking care of itself - it is also looking out to the community. "It's only natural to ask yourself what can you do to help, to be part of the solution," says Ukpolo. SUNO has been helping by conducting workshops for small businesses in the community on how to navigate their way with FEMA.

The June killings of five teenagers particularly affected SUNO, which is known for its social work and criminal justice schools, so in September they are facilitating a city wide summit that will bring together leaders in the business and civic communities to talk about crime prevention in New Orleans.

Not three days…not two weeks…but four months to a new Tulane

The Saturday before Hurricane Katrina hit New Orleans, 1600 freshman were scheduled to move into the dorms at Tulane University.

Florence Kizza

Yvette Jones, Tulane's senior vice president for external affairs & COO, recalls "We moved the freshman in, told them to meet in the auditorium at 1 p.m., welcomed them and said, 'You need to leave. Parents, take your students with you.'"

At 4 p.m., the 150 remaining freshman, along with 500 international students, football players and other students, boarded buses bound for Jackson State University, Miss. at the invitation of its president, a former Tulane administrator.

"We thought we'd be gone for a three-day weekend," says Jones. Ironically, when Katrina hit New Orleans it also hit Tulane's evacuation site. Jackson State was without electricity and water, and by the following Thursday, the evacuees had been routed to Atlanta and Dallas airports on their way to alternative destinations.

Meanwhile, Jones and her colleagues in Jackson were mobilizing people still left at the school in New Orleans. These included facilities workers, the president and 250 people in the medical center.

At that point, they thought the school would reopen in about two weeks.

"Thursday, the key administrators reconvened in Houston, Texas, and started planning a new university by Friday," says Jones. "It was really a building process. On day one, we focused on what we needed: getting payroll out, getting our data systems so we could get the email system back up. We built a task force for specific items and we didn't get caught up in the long term. It was the task for the day - like building a house."

Tulane stayed closed for fall semester, maintaining an office in Houston until December. On November 1, they were able to start moving their administrative functions back to New Orleans. Tulane sustained $200 million in property damages, and in the middle of September, a company from Miami began its clean up process and loss evaluation.

In days immediately after Katrina hit, Tulane administrators gathered in Houston hotels. Daily meetings were held in the "war room."

Tulane dormitories took in several feet of water.

Jones says that by moving quickly they were able to limit the amount of damage, and rebuild the campus in four months.

In November, they invited students back and went on the road recruiting to let everyone know they would be open for the spring semester. Nearly 600 schools across the country had taken in Tulane's students.

"Leading up to the school's reopening, we were very focused on getting the campus built," says Jones, "but we realized that so many of the things you rely upon the city to provide were going to be left up to us. We had to begin to plan for things we'd never planned for."

One such issue was student and staff housing. The school leased a cruise ship which docked on the Mississippi River, bought an apartment complex and set up temporary structures on campus. 

The schooling for the faculty's children was another issue. Tulane gave $1.5 million to open a charter K-12 school, collaborating with a nearby elementary school that provided teachers. Members of Teach for America also staffed the school, which opened in January 2006. Tulane continued to pay their faculty members during the fall semester, even though most of them couldn't come to work. "You don't want to lose your workforce," Jones explains.

By the end of December, students were registering for the spring semester. "We had lost all of our students. All of them enrolled in other places for the fall semester. There was an incredible excitement and a great sense of pride with reopening in January," Jones recalls.

Classes resumed on January 17 with a student and staff count 18 percent below that of the fall semester, but other than that Jones says, it was "as much back to normal as you could imagine. But the students had experiences at different campuses during the fall, and it gave them something to look at in comparison."

"You can't go through something like this and not have changed," she continues, reflecting. "Even though it was on such a great scale and an unusual storm, there are so many lessons to be learned. You do develop an approach to getting things done when you don't understand why you can't get anything done. If you can rebuild your campus in four months, you shouldn't have delays on anything anymore. You can pretty much do anything."
 

The piece of Mississippi history that Katrina did not
blow away

On the front lawn of the University of Southern Mississippi's Gulf Park campus in Long Beach, Miss., a tree stands 50 feet tall, with a trunk that's 18 feet around and 5 feet wide, and foliage that spans 156 feet.

Florence Kizza

This is Friendship Oak.

A plaque reads: I am called 'Friendship Oak.' Those who enter my shadow are supposed to remain friends through all their lifetime no matter where fate may take them in after years.

Friendship Oak is a well-known tourist attraction having stood through more than 500 years of Mississippi history.

On August 29, 2005, Hurricane Katrina hit the Gulf Coast of Mississippi as a category 3 storm with winds exceeding 100 miles per hour and a tidal surge as high as 30 feet. The university, the second largest in the state with 15,050 students, saw its share of destruction, with more than $200 million in damages as well as loss of equipment, intellectual property and revenue. One hundred and twenty-eight faculty and staff lost their homes, and 1,000 students withdrew from the university.

The Gulf Park campus, established in fall 2002, sustained damages to every single one of its buildings totaling $23.9 million. After Katrina, the campus moved to the HealthMark Center in Gulfport, Miss., where portable buildings were set up as offices and classrooms for classes to resume on October 10.

"They surmounted all the odds and accomplished the unimaginable," says Pat Joachim, Gulf Park's associate provost. "Everyone just pulled together to focus on a common goal and that was to help us get the semester back on track as soon as possible."

Friendship Oak is still standing.

Hattiesburg after Katrina. (Photo by David Tisdale)

New oak tree planted. (Photo by Stephen Rouse)

The new goal is to be back on the Gulf Park campus for fall 2007. The university is also trying to find 125 to 150 acres of property in Harrison County to build an additional campus.

But you're wondering about the tree, aren't you?

So was Shelia White, director of marketing and public relations for the Gulf Park campus. So three days after the storm hit, she went back to the school.

"Piles of debris make my journey difficult," she writes in a press release dated September 9, 2005. "Yet, as I turn the corner I see my old friend. Standing tall and proud. …I am overwhelmed with emotion. Friendship Oak has survived. Its endurance is symbolic of this community. We are tattered and torn but we will thrive again. We have strength that will overcome this catastrophe."

A note was added on the university's hurricane recovery website: "For those who have expressed concern about the Friendship Oak on the Gulf Park campus, it did survive the storm. It was stripped clean of leaves and its platform, but all major limbs are in tact."

White ends her update by saying, "Eventually, new leaves will adorn this magnificent giant oak tree, just as a new economy will grow in this community. Friends will again visit to witness the beauty of the Friendship Oak, just as friends will again visit the Mississippi Gulf Coast to witness our strength, determination and beauty."

And, one year after the storm, at a commemoration service on the Southern Miss. campus in Hattiesburg, another oak tree is planted. This tree will replace one of many trees that fell during the storm. The stone at the base reads: In memory of the victims of Hurricane Katrina, dedicated at the University of Southern Mississippi, August 29, 2006.

Visit Friendship Oak's web site at http://www.usm.edu/gulfcoast/friendship_oak.html.