Report from Petal:
Early Care and Education Providers Struggle to Reopen

James L. Smith of Petal gazes at the remains of the giant oak that crushed his child care business August 31. Click on photo for larger view.

Smith shows Julia Todd of the Mississippi Department of Human Services (center) and Laura Beth Hebbler of the Office of the Governor where the tree hit the Learn, Play and Slumber Preschool. Click on photo for larger view.

Inside, Smith stands amid the ruins of a preschool classroom. Click on photo for larger view.

Margie Nobles of Petal turns away from the scene of her family’s demolished child care center for infants and toddlers. Click on photo for larger view.

Festus Simkins of the Mississippi Department of Health (left) and Louise Davis (second from left) and Norma Hayes (right) of Mississippi State University Extension Service talk with the proprietor of a damaged family child care home. Click on photo for larger view.

Nadine Coleman watches workers remove wheelbarrow loads of damaged walls and ceilings from the Petal Parenting Center. Click on photo for larger view.

Inside the Petal Parenting Center, Nadine Coleman pointed to extensive patches of mold that formed on rain-soaked ceiling tiles. Click on photo for larger view.

Back row, left to right: Louise Davis, MSU Extension Service; Festus Simkins, Mississippi Department of Health; Rose Harrell, Director, NEEDS Child Care Centers. Middle row, left to right: Norma Hayes, MSU Extension Service; Margie Nobles, Petal; Annjo Lemons, MSU Excel by Five Community Initiative; Laura Beth Hebbler, Mississippi Head Start-State Collaboration Office; Julia Todd, Office for Children and Youth, Mississippi Department of Human Services. Front row, left to right: Nadine Coleman, Petal Parenting Center; Cathy Grace, MSU Early Childhood Institute. Click on photo for larger view.

SEPT. 11, 2005 | James L. Smith ducked as he led visitors beneath the sagging beams and caved-in roof of the former preschool classroom of his child care center in Petal, Mississippi.

“I don’t think I can take this,” he said. His center, the Learn, Play, and Slumber Preschool, was until August 31 the home away from home for between 40 and 50 children whose parents worked in a local warehouse or for the nursing home or ambulance company, or studied at nearby University of Southern Mississippi.

In the wide belt of Alabama, Mississippi, and Louisiana raked by Hurricane Katrina as it roared northward from the Gulf Coast, the preschool, a still-uncounted number of other child care centers and family child care homes, and most of the businesses and houses in Smith’s community were damaged or destroyed. An enormous wind-blown oak had fallen across the front of Smith’s center; although the staff had saved most of the furniture, equipment, and supplies by moving them to a cinder-block addition at the back of the building, they now had no safe place to return the materials.

But the Petal parents needed to return to their jobs and were beseeching Smith and his wife, “Miss Eddie” Smith, to reopen.

“If you could have any one thing you needed right now, what would it be?” a visitor asked him Sept. 8.

“A building,” Smith replied. “The parents are calling and I don’t know what to tell them.” The Smiths had no insurance; their family business was gone, and with it the child care support that enabled approximately 15 working-class families in Petal to hold jobs and go to school.

Nearby, another falling tree had crushed a family-owned center for infants and toddlers. The owners planned to offer those children’s families temporary child care in the center for three- and four-year-olds they operated across the narrow street, but that small center could not accommodate so many children for long. Outside town, down a winding road where power lines drooped within ten feet of the pavement and every house was splintered or smashed, the proprietor of a family child care home could not reopen for the five working families she served until an insurance adjuster could arrive to inspect the damage to her roof and upstairs rooms.

Petal is 65 miles from the Mississippi coast, at the upper edge of the second-worst damage zone. (See map of Katrina damage in Mississippi.) Delegations from Mississippi State University in Starkville and state agencies in Jackson met there Sept. 8, rushing down Interstate 59 and Mississippi Highway 49, past miles of snapped pines, weaving between convoys of fire trucks, rescue vehicles, military flatbed trucks, and city buses from as far away as New York City. Here and there, people had attached American Red Cross posters to exit signs on the interstate, indicating to traveling Katrina survivors that help was available off the road. An 18-wheeler careened north, loaded with racks of dead and dying chickens.

The groups converged at the Petal Parenting Center, a colorful facility in a renovated red brick church where the Petal School District offered parents ideas about how to care for their children, and a local Head Start program operated. Petal was one of four pilot communities in an experiment called Excel by Five, in which local residents were coming together to set new priorities for child-friendly public services. Nadine Coleman, director of the center, had already set up the chairs in the former sanctuary for an Excel by Five meeting scheduled for the week of the storm. But last Thursday officials came by, viewed the ripped roof and the alarming orange mold growing throughout the building, and condemned half of the facility. As her guests discussed the counseling that children, parents, and early childhood practitioners in Katrina’s path would need, Coleman stared ahead.

“I can’t keep a train of thought,” she said. A few minutes later, she walked out back, past piles of destroyed ceiling tiles, to gaze upon a giant oak that had split in the storm, crushing a chain link fence. “I had put in a purchase order for a wrought iron fence along there. I’m glad now that it hadn’t come through yet.”

In an informal meeting in Coleman’s conference room, state officials and MSU representatives exchanged information about how to rebuild Mississippi’s early care and education infrastructure. Julia Todd, director of the Office for Children and Youth of the Mississippi Department of Human Services, discussed procedures for delivering payments to providers in the state’s child care subsidy program. Festus Simkins described temporary waivers of certain regulations for child care providers hit by Katrina, and passed out copies of a news release urging citizens to wear rubber boots and gloves and goggles while cleaning up storm-damaged areas. Laura Beth Hebbler, director of the Mississippi Head Start-State Collaboration Office, who works out of the Office of the Governor and had been staffing a crisis call center, said federal help would arrive soon, but, “Your resources are among yourselves right now.”

The next day, health inspectors returned to the Petal Parenting Center and found that the mold was spreading. They told Nadine Coleman they had to condemn the other half of her center, too.

Updated 06/14/2006