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Bush Visits School Rebuilt After Katrina

Former President George W. Bush visited Warren Easton Charter High School in New Orleans on the 10th anniversary of Hurricane Katrina.

By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS and REUTERS on Publish Date August 28, 2015. Photo by Jonathan Bachman/Reuters. Watch in Times Video »

NEW ORLEANS — Returning here Friday 10 years after this city was inundated, former President George W. Bush painted a rosy picture of the recovery since Hurricane Katrina, saying that the devastation had “sparked a decade of reform” in public schools and declaring, “New Orleans is back, and better than ever.”

Visiting one of the schools that became a charter in those early years after the storm, Mr. Bush focused on education, citing the failings of the city’s public schools before Hurricane Katrina, and the marked improvement since. “Isn’t it amazing? The storm nearly destroyed New Orleans and yet, now, New Orleans is the beacon for school reform,” he said.

Mr. Bush did not address what made the flooding a rich target for critics of his administration: the weakness of the initial response to the disaster, when federal, state and city agencies were widely seen as doing far too little to help the stranded and displaced, and doing it much too slowly.

Many New Orleans residents make the distinction between those horrific first days and what was eventually a robust federal rebuilding effort — a difference Mr. Bush himself noted in his memoir, “Decision Points.” “I should have recognized the deficiencies sooner and intervened faster,” he wrote.

Continue reading the main story 10 Years After Katrina The New Orleans of 2015 has been altered, and not just by nature. In some ways, it is booming as never before. In others, it is returning to pre-Katrina realities of poverty and violence, but with a new sense of dislocation for many, too.

“All of us who are old enough to remember will never forget the images of our fellow Americans amid a sea of misery and ruin,” Mr. Bush said Friday. But twice, he said, “I hope you remember what I remember,” citing the work of military personnel, law enforcement and thousands of volunteers in rescuing, feeding, sheltering and rebuilding.

“In spite of the devastation, we have many fond memories,” he added, recalling sitting with Russel L. Honoré, the retired Army lieutenant general who coordinated the military response to the storm, “on top of one of those big ships, strategizing.”

Mr. Bush received an enthusiastic response from several hundred dignitaries, students and school staff members in the auditorium of Warren Easton Charter High School, on Canal Street, a former city school that was flooded and battered 10 years ago and reopened the next year as a charter.

But in the city at large, where signs of recovery are just blocks away from neighborhoods where little progress can be seen, bitter memories of the days after the flood are still common. The overhaul of schools itself has been polarizing, as more than 8,500 employees of the old school system, most of them from the city’s black middle class, were laid off in the first year.

“I guess I’m not feeling quite as magnanimous as some others are,” said Bob Mann, who was the communications director for Kathleen Babineaux Blanco, the governor 10 years ago.

“The first week was awful, the second week was better, and after that, they increasingly did a very good job of helping the region get back on its feet,” Mr. Mann said. “But that doesn’t absolve anyone, including the state, of their failures in that first week. And it should be remembered.”

More than 1,000 people died because of the flooding, hundreds of thousands were displaced and 80 percent of the city was left underwater for days.

Mr. Bush’s visit contrasted with the sight of President Obama walking through some of the hardest-hit neighborhoods on Thursday and saying that as much as the city had recovered, more needed to be done.

“We came to realize that what started out as a natural disaster became a man-made disaster, a failure of government to look after its own citizens,” Mr. Obama said at the Andrew P. Sanchez Community Center in the city’s Lower Ninth Ward. “What the storm laid bare was another tragedy, a deeper tragedy that had been brewing for decades.”

The Warren Easton school, which Mr. Bush visited in 2006 on the first anniversary of the flood, was the first public high school in Louisiana when it opened in 1843. Mr. Bush was joined there Friday by his wife, Laura; Mayor Mitch Landrieu; Ms. Blanco; General Honoré; and others.

OPEN Map Map: From the Graphics Archive: Mapping Katrina and Its Aftermath

Outside the school, one man held up a placard with a well-known photograph of Mr. Bush, days after the storm, gazing out an airplane window at the wrecked city: an image Mr. Bush later said he came to regret. Below the picture, the man had written, “You’re Early — Come Back in a Week.”

But the former president’s visit got a warmer response from some unexpected quarters.

“I think it’s wonderful,” said former Senator Mary L. Landrieu, a Democrat and the mayor’s sister, who joined Mr. Bush at the school and praised him for supporting New Orleans’s education overhaul.

Ms. Blanco, a Democrat, joined Mr. Bush and the city’s mayor at the time, Ray Nagin, as the subjects of intense criticism in Hurricane Katrina’s aftermath. On Friday, she recalled those early days, when Mr. Bush’s senior adviser, Karl Rove, falsely accused her of not having signed a disaster declaration before the storm’s landfall, and when the director of the Federal Emergency Management Agency at the time, Michael Brown, promised buses that did not arrive.

But she said she did not hold that against Mr. Bush personally.

“I always thought his heart was in it,” she said. “But I didn’t think he was well served by the people around him.”

Ms. Blanco said that she had had a “nice visit” last year when Mr. Bush went to Lafayette, La., but that she had never discussed that period with him in any depth. “I’d like to talk with him at length someday,” she said.

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