Displaced students have varied reactions to their new school

Published: 2005-10-26

MADISON, Miss. (CNS) -- Each of the students brought by Hurricane Katrina to St. Joseph Catholic School in Madison has a different take on things at the new school. "There's more drama," said 15-year-old Michael Ali about attending a school where 49 percent of the students are female. The 10th-grader began the school year at all-male Archbishop Rummel High School in New Orleans. Megan White, 17, found her new schoolmates already "cliqued-off." "Students already had their friends," said White, who was a senior at Xavier University Preparatory School in New Orleans. That's a little rough at first for any new student, she said. For 10th-grader Michael Turlich, getting to know people was easier at 485-student St. Joseph than at his former school, Brother Martin High School in Metairie, La., which had 1,600 students before Katrina. "I like it better because you get to know everybody and in a really big school you don't get to meet everybody," Turlich told the Mississippi Catholic, newspaper of the Jackson Diocese.

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