Can President Obama save Katrina's kids?

Katrina’s Kids
President Obama is visiting New Orleans for only one day. His potential impact on the city's children, however, could last much longer.

By Mary Carmichael
Newsweek Web Exclusive
Oct 15, 2009
On Thursday, President Barack Obama was scheduled to visit a New Orleans school that was wracked by Hurricane Katrina and reopened only after residents of the Ninth Ward put in a lot of work. By day's end, he planned to leave. Critics and local officials have been quick to slam Obama for making such a brief visit. But the president doesn't need to be on the ground in New Orleans for long. "He's going there to make a statement, and he doesn't need more than a day to make it," says Irwin Redlener, president of the nonprofit Children's Health Fund and commissioner of the National Commission on Children and Disasters, a bipartisan panel appointed by the president and congressional leaders.

The more important statement Obama will make won't come in the form of a speech, and it won't be made on Thursday. It will consist of what his administration actually does over the next three years for the Gulf Coast's population, especially its children, who are still suffering mightily. "Kids get a lot of lip service in disaster planning, but they tend to get far fewer resources than they need," says Redlener. "The mantra of 'children are our most valuable resource' is almost never matched by actual funding."

Certainly, that's been the case in the gulf since Katrina. After years of bureaucratic haggling, recovery efforts are starting to get some momentum and some cash—Obama's administration has allocated more than $1 billion in aid for Louisiana alone. But "thousands of families have been falling through the cracks because it's been such a disorganized and disrupted safety net," says Redlener, who briefed the president's recovery team at the White House on Tuesday. "There's just too many of them in the gulf now who are still waiting for something to happen."
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