SPPD graduate student Ashley Atkinson of Roanoke, Va., removes moldy plaster in a New Orleans home. Photo courtesy of USC Gould School of Law

Issue: Summer 2006

‘Things Are Not OK Down There’

On an alternative spring break to New Orleans, policy and social work graduate students get up-close and personal with the public policy and counseling dimensions of an urban crisis.

The USC Gould School of Law was not the only professional school to send volunteers to New Orleans over spring break. Twenty-two students and three faculty members from the USC School of Policy, Planning, and Development and the USC School of Social Work collaborated on a trip as well.

Organized by Michael Moody, an assistant professor of policy who used to live on the Mississippi Coast, the trip was a combination of hard, physical labor and hands-on learning about environmental and political issues vis-à-vis clean-up and reconstruction.

With help from the USC Volunteer Center, Moody partnered with the Louisiana Environmental Action Network, which supplied the USC team with respirators, biohazard suits, latex gloves and bleach – items, the students were quick to notice, not available to most of the homeowners doing their own clean-up.

The students removed ruined tile from a church sanctuary in rural Henry, La., and helped gut two New Orleans homes right down to the studs. One belonged to a police officer; the other was owned by a 99-year-old man. USC’s pickaxe-and-crowbar brigade saved each homeowner between $8,000 and $20,000 – the going rate for demolition in the city.

That was the service part of the trip.

The learning part involved talking to community members about how the tragedy had affected them and discovering what services they still required. The social work students were particularly interested in the mental-health consequences of the disaster. For the policy and planning students, the real-life problems of post-Katrina public resource distribution, governmental response to public needs and land-use planning were like worst-case scenarios ripped from the pages of textbooks.

Back from their labors, the service-minded graduate students briefed the USC community on their week of hands-on learning. At the screening of Bearing Witness, a video documentary shot by social work field faculty member Rafael Angulo, several in the audience were moved to tears.

Aaron Grasse, who will complete his master’s in social work in 2007, can’t get over how much work still remains to be done. “Seven months later, it looked like [the hurricane] happened two weeks ago.” Grasse has compiled a 12-minute photo montage of his experience (mediasite.socialwork.usc.edu/mediasite/viewer). “This is exactly what each and every Louisianan asked for – for us to go home and tell people that things are not OK down there.”

– Allison Engel