Rebuilding St. Tammany Schools

FEMA obligates more than $107 million to help the St. Tammany Parish school system after Katrina.

Hurricane Katrina brought a lot of devastation especially to the south Slidell area, where we had three school buildings that were devastated by the storm.

 Long term effects of three schools, causing us to either have to tear down and rebuild or in the case of one of our historically significant buildings to restore that building so that we could continue to have it be what it means to the citizens and community of Slidell, of great historical value.

Brock Elementary School is one of our oldest schools.

It was substantially destroyed. In fact, it probably would have been a faster and maybe even a less costly project to tear it down and start over. But because of its historical significance, the people of the community wanted to see it restored to its former building state. And in December, 2008, over 3 years since Katrina hit us, we were able to bring the students and staff back to that building and it was quite a homecoming.

Salmen High school which was probably the most damaged school building we had. We had to tear it down and start over. We built a temporary campus for students with FEMA���s help right there on the baseball field, so they���re on their original campus site, and then they���re able to see the new school go up right before their very eyes as they look out the windows of their classrooms.

The process does work, it may not always go as quickly as we���d like to have it but we along the way, we���ve met some very nice people in the FEMA organization who���ve tried really hard to help us and, all in all, we���re very pleased that we���ve been able to work with this organization and to be at the point where we can all be happy with the results of our efforts.