This is what being a New Orleanian means...

If I was slated to be one of St. Aug's drum majors, I'd live in a FEMA trailer, too:

Montrell is one of an unknown number of children who have returned to attend school in New Orleans and now live with relatives, friends or alone while their parents stayed in far-off cities. Like thousands of other displaced residents, his life morphed into a juggling act. But he returned to reclaim the unique trappings of his life in New Orleans -- St. Augustine and the Marching 100 -- despite the gnawing uncertainty of a post-disaster existence.

From the beginning, the family agreed to let Montrell return to New Orleans. They couldn't deny his fierce desire to be back at St. Augustine -- an all-boys school where young men revel in "brotherhood" rather than merely school -- to finish his senior year and play in the school's marching band. "If I wouldn't have come back, I wouldn't have felt complete as a person," Montrell said one day in front of the trailer.

On the evening of Thursday, August 25, 2005, we were at St. Joseph's Church, watching my son get his Brother Martin High senior ring. On 28-August, we packed up and headed to Shreveport, staying there until the following Sunday, 4-Sep. That day, we drove down to Planet Hooston, where we enrolled Justin in St. Pius X High School. Sr. Donna, Pius' Principal, was fantastic, settling Justin and a number of other kids from metro New Orleans in as best as they could. She and the Pius faculty worked extensively with their student body, educating them on how angry the New Orleans kids were going to be, and how that anger wasn't focused on them or their school, but on being displaced because of the storm.

In spite of the warm welcome, Justin was miserable. It wasn't his school. Two weeks later, when Brother Martin High announced that they would resume classes at Catholic High in Baton Rouge, Justin and I headed back home to check out the house, then drove to Baton Rouge. We had no plan other than to see to it that he was enrolled. By the end of that Sunday evening session, he found out that the family of one of his friends had leased a house in Baton Rouge, and they were willing to let him sleep on the floor of the living room so he could go to his school. We got the house re-built as soon as possible, Brother Martin repaired the Gentilly campus as soon as they could, and the boys were back on Elysian Fields Avenue for the second semester. The Class of 2006 finished the hear at their school and will go down in the history of Brother Martin as the toughest class to ever graduate.

St. Augustine High had a tougher time of recovering from the storm. Not only did their campus take on more water than Brother Martin, St. Aug's all-black student body was scattered to the four winds. The school had to go through a longer transitional phase than Brother Martin, and it's understandable that Montrell Givens didn't want to be part of that transition:

In 2006, St. Mary's Academy, St. Augustine and Xavier University Preparatory, came together to start the MAX School on Xavier's campus and create the MAX band. The LeBlancs had agreed to let their son return to New Orleans at the time, but Montrell stayed in Houston. He wanted to wait. The makeshift school wasn't St. Aug. He had spent two years there and wanted to be only there.

When the LeBlancs learned that St. Augustine would return to its campus for this school year, the final discussion in their Houston apartment seemed almost like just a formality. The decision had already been made. The family sat around a table.

"You go to school and get your education," his mother recalls telling Montrell.

I haven't liked St. Augustine High School since 1971, when I was an eighth grader attending the school that was their biggest rival. I look forward to the day that St. Aug and Brother Martin are both settled back into Gentilly, so I can return to not liking them. In the meantime, I can't be anything but proud of the young men from both schools.

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