A new school home after the hurricane, Part 1 of 3
Formerly of Archbishop Hannan High School in Meraux, La., Aaron Machen, a senior at Catholic High School in Little Rock, carries the memory of Hurricane Katrina with him every day.
But being part of the successful football team and brotherhood of the all-boys Catholic High has helped him to begin again — by making new friends, creating new memories and, most of all, finding a new place to call home.
In early January, Machen spoke with Arkansas Catholic about his transition to life in Arkansas.
Machen’s family was already in the process of relocating to Arkansas when Hurricane Katrina devastated the Gulf Coast Aug. 29. His father, Don, moved to Little Rock in December 2004 to begin a new job with the U.S. Postal Service. Aaron, his mother, Vicki, and 12-year-old brother, Taylor, stayed behind in Marrero to finish the school year. Marrero is a suburb south of New Orleans, while Aaron’s school was in Meraux, near Chalmette, which is north of New Orleans.
Aaron’s mom left her position as Archbishop Hannan’s finance director at the end of the 2004-05 school year and began the move to Little Rock. But Aaron, 17, planned to stay behind with a friend’s family and finish his senior year at the school he had called home since eighth grade.
“It was like my senior year,” he said. “This was like my family.”
Machen said the school year began as expected and he played his first football game of the season on Friday, Aug. 26. He had no idea a huge hurricane was threatening the Gulf Coast.
“I get home and my mom calls and she was like, ’Are you packed yet?’ And I was like ’for what?’”
His friend’s family decided to ride out the hurricane, so Aaron headed out on his own to meet up with family in Mississippi before driving on to Little Rock.
“I packed everything up Saturday and I went to my aunt’s house in Hattiesburg, ” he said.
It was a long four-hour trip for Machen who came desperately close to running out of gas.
“I was very thankful because our head football coach at Archbishop Hannan High School knew that my son was alone and stayed in constant contact with him to make sure that he was OK on the road,” Vicki Machen said. “And this man lost everything.”
Once he reached his aunt’s house, she was able to reach Aaron’s frantic mother to let her know he was safe.
Aaron’s aunt and her family decided to ride out the hurricane in Hattiesburg, which was hit by tornadoes.
“It was pretty intense,” he said. “That’s the first time I’ve been through one.”
After the storm passed, Machen drove to Rustin, La., to be with his older brother, Ryan, 21, a student at Louisiana Tech University. Then a few days later he drove up to his parent’s townhouse in Sherwood, just north of Little Rock.
When news of the devastation back home broke, the reality of the situation began to sink in.
Machen located the friend he was staying with in New Orleans by cell phone and learned his home was destroyed. Now his friend is staying in Lafayette, La., with his grandmother and going to school.
“I basically didn’t talk for two days,” Machen said.
“I was just thinking, what about all my friends. I can’t graduate with them. Our senior trip’s down the drain; football team down the drain. Everything that I wanted to do was just gone.”
His mom suggested he enroll in a school, and he found out about Catholic High.
“I came here, looked around it and just fell in love with it,” he said. “I was overwhelmed by how nice everybody was, and I just made more friends than I ever thought I would in one day,” he said.
He was invited to join the football team and before he knew he was on the practice field.
Machen quickly formed a strong bond with his new team.
“You gotta have a bond in football. If you don’t have a bond, you’re not going to go anywhere,” he said. “Our team is really close, so that’s why we got to the semi-finals.”
The semi-finals of the Class 5A high school state playoffs, that is. The Catholic High Rockets finished the season with an 11-2 record, losing only the first game of the season to Fayetteville and the last game to Springdale. The Rockets finished as the state’s third-ranked team.
“They started calling me ’lucky charm,’” he said. “I got here and I dressed out for the Sylvan Hills game and we won that 49-7. … I was like ’Wow, this is going to be really good.’”
Coach Richard Cochran, assistant defensive line coach for the Catholic High Rockets, said Machen worked hard and fit right in with the team.
Machen always had a positive attitude, was very personable and “the guys really like him a lot.”
One would never know of the ordeal he had been through by the way he interacted with others, the coach said. “I am amazed by his resilience.”
Machen said the school bought him football gear, a senior tie, class ring and gave him free tuition and books and even offered to buy him new clothes.
“I was just amazed by that,” he said.
His brother, Taylor, is in the seventh grade at Bryant Middle School. His family purchased a home in Alexander, just south of Little Rock, in November and attends St. Theresa Church in Little Rock.
Even though he thought Little Rock was “pretty boring at first,” Machen said with friends it makes all the difference.
“This school, anything it wants to do, I’d back it up completely after everything it’s done for me,” he said. “I love this school.”
Vicki Machen said it meant a lot to her son to have some type of normalcy back in his life.
“These boys are unbelievable. It’s a big brotherhood. You definitely buy into it and you feel a part of it,” she said.
Part 2 of this series on Gulf Coast students relocated to Arkansas Catholic schools will appear in the Feb. 4 issue.
Schools seek ways to offset displaced students’ expenses
In September the Catholic Schools Office for the Diocese of Little Rock reported that Catholic schools in Arkansas enrolled 230 Gulf Coast students displaced by Hurricanes Katrina and Rita. Currently, 85 of those remain in 20 schools throughout the state. More than half of these, 48, are in the greater Little Rock area.
Vernell Bowen, superintendent of Catholic Schools, said within a week of Hurricane Katrina Arkansas Catholic schools decided to waive tuition, the cost of textbooks, uniforms and any other fees for displaced students.
Ileana Dobbins, principal at Our Lady of the Holy Souls in Little Rock, said in September her school enrolled 19 displaced students. Today 14 students remain.
“When all this happened we started a tuition and assistance relief fund and our families donated to that,” she said.
At Catholic High School in Little Rock, principal Steve Straessle said 12 evacuee students started in September, but several have returned to their home states.
He said alumni and friends of the school “responded overwhelmingly” to a plea to assist with the expenses of tuition and other fees for the students.
But there are still expenses yet to cover.
“Textbook companies and uniform companies were very generous in donating the textbooks and uniforms that we needed,” Bowen said. “But basically the tuition is the big thing that’s not being covered.”
A grant from the National Catholic Education Association will help, she said.
The Diocese of Little Rock received a $10,000 grant from the “Child to Child: A Catholic Campaign to Aid Education” from the NCEA, part of a $1 million campaign to assist students affected by the recent Gulf Coast hurricanes.
According to the NCEA, students in Catholic schools throughout the United States donated money to help children in hurricane affected areas as well as areas impacted by a large number of evacuee students like Arkansas.
Though the $10,000 would help, it would not even put a dent in the actual cost, Bowen said.
According to the Catholic Schools Office, the average cost of educating one child in a Catholic elementary school in Arkansas is $3,160 a year, while the cost for one student in a Catholic high school is $5,881.
The recently passed Hurricane Recovery Act should provide relief.
“There will be money available for students that are in private and public schools that will be coming from the federal government,” Bowen said. “We’re just now in the beginning stages of that process to determine how we’re going to access that money.”
She said she is working with the U.S. State Department to learn how to access the federal assistance and will share this information with the schools that would be responsible for applying for the fund through their local public school districts.
“The Hurricane Recovery Act will impact reimbursement … we just don’t know how yet,” she said.
Dobbins said her school’s tuition and assistance relief fund is still available for contributions.
“Right now we’re doing registration for next school year and I think these families are still in limbo, so right now from that fund we are paying the registration fees for the kids because we want to hold a spot for them,” she said. “They’re part of our family now.”
“If they decide to go back to New Orleans or if they decide to stay, that’s nothing that they have to decide right now, because a lot of them aren’t ready to make that decision,” she said.
