Their hardest assignment is rebuilding the school

NEW ORLEANS -

Ben Franklin High may offer AP Calc, but it's a simple arithmetic problem that's been bedeviling it lately.

Before Katrina, the New Orleans powerhouse magnet school was piping about four students per year into Penn, with 17 applicants vying for space in the Class of 2008.

After the storm, just one application trickled from Ben Franklin High to Ben Franklin's university. That student ultimately matriculated elsewhere.

But here's where the math gets tricky: Despite the hurricane, Penn still accepted a record high of 16 students from Louisiana, one greater than the year before.

Essentially, while other traditional feeder schools in the state waded through the hurricane to keep pumping students into West Philadelphia, Ben Franklin students were washed away.

As a magnet school, Ben Franklin draws Orleans Parish's highest achieving students regardless of income or geography.

To get in, you need at least a 3.0 GPA and exceptionally high test scores. An easy way out is letting your grades slide below a C average. Then it's the boot. Ben Franklin High doesn't mess around.

Neither does Carol Christen, its hard-nosed principal.

Short with broad shoulders, Christen looks about as sturdy as they come. But, she admits, not quite sturdy enough to keep her from falling apart when she first saw what Katrina had done to her school.

Walking up to the school on that first visit, just two weeks after the storm, couldn't have made her hopeful. Ben Franklin is located in Lakeview, one of areas hardest hit by the 17th Street levee breach, and, even today, the devastation is clear from the school's front steps.

The neighborhood across the way still looks waterlogged and white FEMA trailers dot the streets. Up until a few weeks ago, a 30-foot fishing boat remained parked in a median in front of the school.

It didn't get any better when Christen walked into the first floor of the building to find the cafeteria, auditorium and computer lab ruined. The warped gym floor looked more like the rolling surface of an ocean than the home of a volleyball team that hadn't been beaten there in over 40 matches.

"Just the idea that we had such a viable school, and look at the condition we were in," she said. "After the initial shock of the downstairs, I really -- I did break down considerably."

The first floor was devastated and everything seemed lost, but Christen's mood turned quickly when she walked upstairs. There was almost an eerie calm to the place. The clocks had all stopped on 10:17 and everything looked the same. Lesson plans sat out on teachers' desks, poised for the first day of school back from the Labor Day break.

"It was like time had stood still," she said.

Surveying the ghostly classrooms, it hit her.

"I knew we could probably have school using the second and third floors," she said.

In the coming months, Christen spearheaded a colossal restoration effort. Parents and teachers helped bleach away mold, the football coach captained cleanup crews and an alumnus led a group of college classmates down on fall break, where in a whirlwind three days they tore out the old gym floor and whipped the school into as good a shape as possible.

By Jan. 17, the school was ready to open its doors again, if only to its second and third floors. Only 540 of the school's 935 students returned, but New Orleans' most impressive high school was back in business.

The decreased enrollment alone doesn't explain why Ben Franklin students across the board stopped applying to the nation's most elite universities while other local schools like Jesuit and Isidore Newman continued to ship their grads west and northeast. Nor was there any significant performance drop-off in the students who returned - today Ben Franklin's profile is as impressive as ever.

Indeed, not only do Ben Franklin's test scores blow away other area public schools, but it's diverse enough to make schools of similar caliber drool. Half the students are white, half are minority. Ninety-nine percent of them head to four-year colleges, and on their way they pass through a college counselling office with posters of not just LSU and Louisiana Lafayette, but schools like Brown, Bates and Boston College.

So why the change?

The answer lies both in demographics and resources. Generally speaking, students attending private schools are going to come from wealthier homes than their public school peers. That means that, first, dealing with the hurricane's aftermath was probably a less harrowing experience for them, and second, even after the financial hit of rebuilding, private school students were more likely to still have the financial capability to attend a pricey private university like Penn.

"Kids in the area, they were all in limbo," Ben Franklin college counselor Beatrice Flair said. "They didn't know where their families were going to be, and they didn't know where they were going to be. And it was almost easier just to fill out that application for LSU."

Also, private and religious schools had the networks and resources to ensure that after the storm their evacuated students landed at high schools of comparable quality - Flair said that students at the nearby Jesuit School were farmed out to affiliates nationwide. As an isolated public school, Ben Franklin's hands were tied. Most Ben Franklin students ended up being swallowed into gigantic, and lower quality, public schools wherever they settled.

To make matters worse, application deadlines fell at a time when Ben Franklin was still closed but many of the area private schools were already open. That was a major disadvantage, according to school counselor Janet DeGrazio and Flair, who both admitted that their students essentially compete for spots at the highest-ranked universities with students from these other local schools.

Communicating also became extremely difficult, as DeGrazio found herself scrambling to send out students transcripts and, without reliable phone and Internet service, making weekly treks to the library to pound out as many recommendation letters as possible. This was not the norm for a school that prides itself on giving each students two years of detailed college counseling.

"I think the bottom line was just people being overwhelmed, not having the college process available to them, and finances," DeGrazio said.

This year, Flair and DeGrazio expect "at least 10" students to apply to Penn and many more to similarly prestigious universities. Still, citing lingering effects, DeGrazio thinks it will take another two to three years for college admissions to normalize. Christen says she expects many students to take advantage of Louisiana's significant in-state incentives, and even if the majority of those 10 students were to get into Penn, there's a fair chance that overstretched bank accounts would redirect them to a state school.

In the mean time, the situation for the rest of the school remains far from normal. Enrollment may have climbed up to 628, and Christen hopes for 700 next fall, but the first floor is still closed off except for the refloored gym. They hope to reopen the auditorium in time for the spring musical, but with waterlines still clearly apparent on auditorium chairs, even that remains in doubt.

While New Orleanians continue to recover, Christen thinks that universities should give hurricane-stricken students a break.

"Any assistance that's given along those lines to help people that have had to go through this terrible disaster, particularly these children trying to go on to college," would be welcome, she said. "Even if they resettle out of the state, what the heck, give them an opportunity. What the heck."

Please note All comments are eligible for publication in The Daily Pennsylvanian.