Oct. 26, 2007 | 06:00 AM EDT

Kendell Goes Back To School

The Lewis-Robertson family returns to New Orleans, thanks to the woman who rebuilt their children's school in the Lower Ninth Ward

"We make the best of the situation," says Tanya (at her old home with Kiara). "But our neighborhood will never be the same." Photo by: YUNGHI KIM

From the house in Dallas to which she had evacuated with her family, elementary school principal Doris Hicks watched on CNN as the neighborhood where she spent her girlhood and built a career seemed to drown in the floodwaters. "Thirty-five of our families did not make it out," says Hicks, 64. "The family found clinging and holding onto one another; the grandmother who was discovered months later in an attic. The mother who lost hold of her 2-year-old in the flood, who then perished with her remaining children in a fire. The stories go on and on. . . ."

In the wake of the storm, officials, from the Secretary of the U.S. Department for Housing and Urban Development to New Orleans's mayor, pondered whether the Lower Ninth should even be rebuilt. "People were talking about writing us off, and I didn't like that," says Hicks. "It was personal for me."

The principal of what was then called the Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. Elementary School for Science & Technology, Hicks had deep roots in the neighborhood. The youngest of 11 children whose father was killed by a hit-and-run driver the year she was born, she was raised there by her childless aunt and uncle.

As a little girl, she was a voracious reader. "I would pick up everything," she says, "especially books about occupations. I liked to dream about what my place in the world might be." By high school, at a time when "girls weren't told they could do anything in a career," the matter was settled. She decided to become a teacher, and "I have never, never thought of any occupation since that day."

When it seemed that the government was abandoning the education of the city's least privileged children, an idea came to Hicks and then crystallized. "Opening our school back in the Lower Ninth Ward would be proof that this neighborhood is not doomed," she says. "People would come back, because the school was back."

At the time, Kendell Lewis's family wasn't so sure. After evacuating to Houston in one of the family's two cars – "The other one floated away," says Kendell's mother, Tanya, 34 – the family anxiously huddled in a hotel room, watching the news in horror as the levees broke one by one. "The third breach, I knew our house was under water," Tanya says. "I knew we weren't ever going back to New Orleans."