KIPP New Orleans/Houston

A wonderful story about the KIPP school in New Orleans, which relocated to Houston and is now going back...

Even with the trauma of Katrina, students made strong academic gains this year. Some older students, who couldn't read when they arrived at NOW, are performing close to their grade level.

"In some cases, I'd see more than a year's worth of learning happening," Bertsch said.

Preliminary results from the Texas Assessment of Knowledge and Skills show that NOW students outperformed displaced students in other Texas schools. Nearly 60 percent of NOW eighth-graders, for example, met the state standards in reading, he said.

--------------------

Gary Robichaux, principal at New Orleans West College Prep School in Houston, hands family members DVDs produced by his students after the school's graduation ceremony Friday. JOHNNY HANSON: FOR THE CHRONICLE
PLAY | BACK | NEXT

June 3, 2006, 12:58AM
KATRINA AFTERMATH
After Gary Robichaux's new charter school in New Orleans was washed away, he came to Houston and started again
School rises to the challenge

By JENNIFER RADCLIFFE
Copyright 2006 Houston Chronicle

http://www.chron.com/disp/story.mpl/front/3924196.html

There was no question this school year would be tough for veteran Louisiana educator Gary Robichaux when he decided to quit his job as a consultant to take over one of New Orleans' lowest-performing campuses, Edward Phillips Middle School on Senate Street.

Just as his 125 rambunctious eighth-graders were getting the hang of walking the halls of his reinvented "Phillips Academy" in straight, quiet lines, Robichaux met an unexpected stumbling block: Attorneys with Phillips Academy of Andover, Mass. — President Bush's old school — called threatening to sue his fledgling charter campus for using the Phillips name.

The attorneys were concerned that people might confuse their $33,000-a-year boarding school with the predominantly black campus on the edge of a public housing development.

"It was kind of a funny story," Robichaux recalled. "It was amusing for a while."

Less than a week later, however, the nationally reported dispute and much of the New Orleans campus were washed away by Hurricane Katrina.

Robichaux's year of making headlines, however, was just beginning.

After the storm, he found his way to the floor of the Astrodome — where two dozen of his former students were living amid the bright lights and rows of cots.

Robichaux and his co-workers at the Knowledge is Power Program — the charter system that runs Phillips and about 45 other schools nationally — started scrambling to find schools for their displaced students in Houston.

"When Katrina hit, our KIPP cousins in New Orleans had a problem and our cousins in HISD had a problem," KIPP co-founder Mike Feinberg said. "You can feel sorry for people with problems or you can be part of the solution."

Before he knew it Robichaux was opening his second campus of the school year, New Orleans West College Prep at Douglass Elementary — 350 miles away from home.

"I don't remember a lot of the beginning, to be honest. It's foggy," said Robichaux, whose home in New Orleans was devastated by the wind and water. "It just happened."

The 300-student campus, which had its graduation ceremonies Friday, served as a microcosm this year for both the pain and resiliency that marked the abbreviated post-Katrina school year...