"We get to do lots of stuff we couldn't do before," says Tanyelle of her new school. Her uniform? "It's pretty," she says. Photo by: YUNGHI KIM
Kendell Goes Back To School
The Lewis-Robertsons – Tanya Lewis, her husband, Joe Robertson, 46, a steak house manager, and kids Larry, now 16, Kendell, Kiara and Tanyelle settled into a cramped apartment and focused on a new future. Joe had work at a restaurant, and the kids, three of whom had attended Doris Hicks's old school back in the Lower Ninth, were now enrolled in Houston. But they weren't happy about it. "The kids kept asking for their school. They wanted to go back to Martin Luther King," says Tanya. "I thought that Larry, as the oldest, would understand more than the littler ones how hard it would be for us in New Orleans. But he cried like a baby. They all kept at us to come home and go to their school in New Orleans."

At the end of 2005, the family took a reconnaissance trip back to their old neighborhood. "I took one look at what was left of our home, and I knew I couldn't live there," says Tanya, who lost all her family photographs, save for one baby picture of Tanyelle.

"Everything was dead – the trees, the grass. There weren't even birds in the sky. I told Joe, 'There's no way I can live like this. I'll die out here.' "

Kendell describes the trip: "I looked in my house and the refrigerator had fallen over in our living room. The dresser was on top of the bed. All our toys had been in the cabinet, and that was gone." Tanyelle, now 5, searched for her Barbie dolls. "I couldn't find them anywhere," she says. To Kiara, "It looked like our house, except that everything was black from the mold."

Even so, back in Houston, the kids continued their lobbying. In June 2006 came a phone call with news from Tanya's brother Roy Lewis back in New Orleans. He had seen signs posted around the Lower Ninth announcing the King school was going to reopen, that it was registering kids for classes. When, at a Fourth of July barbecue, Tanya and Joe gathered the kids around and announced they'd be moving back, "Kendell and Kiara jumped around and screamed," she says. "And Tanyelle, who'd been in Head Start when the storm came, was excited because she was going to get to go to 'big school.' "