Schools and hurricanes

You know, if it made any sense to have a bird flu / peak oil / homeschooling blog, I'd probably post every day. My non-education-related interests flared up in the past week, with uncontrolled human-to-human H5N1 transmission in Indonesia, and oil and gas shortages looming because of Rita. I have had some school-related observations, though.

In the wake of Katrina, Bush proposed allocating $1.9 billion in private school vouchers to aid school-aged children displaced by the hurricane, although no doubt most of these children previously attended public schools. This is another instance of taxpayer dollars paying to send children to private institutions. The Republicans are expert at "incremental" politics, a method of attaining one's goals through relentlessly pursuing minor changes and half-measures, gradually changing legislation a sentence at a time, over decades if necessary. They have not by any means given up on the total privatization of schooling, and as much as I complain about public schools, the CEP example shows that privatization would be a disaster.

I've blogged before about fuel costs and the impracticality of busing kids to mega-schools once oil supply starts to fall short of oil demand (here, here, and here). So I found it interesting that the governor of Georgia has called for 2 days of school closings to alleviate diesel fuel shortages. The diesel fuel requirements of school buses (about 250,000 gallons per day in Georgia) compete with the needs of farmers who are bringing in the harvest at this time of the year. Although this particular shortage will be relatively short-lived (depends on how many refineries were destroyed or damaged, how many oil rigs were lost in the Gulf, and how much damage the Continental pipeline received), schools will increasingly compete for fuel with other segments of society.

I've found it bizarre, as I've read about Katrina refugees, that so much emphasis was placed on "getting the kids back to school." Here these kids have been through terrible trauma, thousands of them living in the hell of the Superdome or the Convention Center for days, and the main concern is to take them away from their parents and relatives. Of course, they phrase it differently: it's all about "giving them a sense of normalcy" by rushing them into Houston schools. Personally I don't think "normalcy" can be achieved while sleeping on cots on the field of the Astrodome.