STAFF EDITORIAL With Louisiana having seen some of the worst storms to hit in years, it is no surprise at all that more students are not at their desks in public schools. Among the hardest hit in the latest head count was St. John the Baptist Parish. Its public school district lost 1 out of every 6 of its students over the past three years. Most of those losses have occurred since August 2021, when Hurricane Ida steamrolled through southeast Louisiana. The storm shut down schools in St. John and they stayed closed, in some cases, for more than two months. Several were damaged, and students and staff went to other locations. The last displaced school, Emily C. Watkins Elementary in LaPlace, is set to return to its original campus this fall, in time for the two-year anniversary of Ida. State Superintendent of Education Cade Brumley said in an interview he's not surprised that the effects of the hurricanes continue. “It was pretty clear to me that we were going to see loss in those southern parishes,” Brumley said. “I was on the ground after the storm and I could tell that housing in the local community was severely impacted by the wind and the rain.” Unfortunately, Ida was not the only big storm to come calling during this decade. Hurricanes Laura and Delta hit a year earlier to the west, savaging the Lake Charles area. Calcasieu and Cameron parishes accounted for a fifth of the students who were missing from public school rolls in fall 2020. Cameron Parish has continued to slowly shed students since then; its enrollment has declined by almost 18% since spring 2020. Calcasieu Parish finally bottomed out in spring 2022 and has added about 400 students since. But Calcasieu schools are still 11.4% below where they were three years ago. There is no way to sugarcoat the consequences of hurricanes like those, with the disruption of housing and jobs and, most consequential for the future, schools and education. In some places, it’s a lack of contractors to do all the work needed at one time. In much of south Louisiana, though, many residents have left, Kevin Belanger, head of the regional planning commission on the Terrebonne coast, said in an interview. Terrebonne Parish has lost almost 2,100 students since the pandemic, a 12% decline. About 1,700 of those students have left since Hurricane Ida. And if families have tried to rebuild, it’s been a hard slog. One issue that keeps cropping up there is the rapid rise in housing insurance rates. ''The thing that kills us is insurance costs,'' Belanger said. ''That is the key driving everything. That is the elephant in the room.’’ As is, we would add, poverty. The lack of affordable housing is a problem in schools, even when jobs are growing: Families living on the margins are likely to move as often as a new apartment rental special opens up. That wreaks havoc with school schedules at the best of times. School enrollment studies by a consortium that included The Associated Press and Stanford University suggested that about 14,000 students are “missing” out of school in the state. Many of them are in the hurricane-afflicted parishes, where recovery can’t happen fast enough. Everyone is familiar with the disruptions of the pandemic closures. But the storms’ impacts may be longer-lasting and lead to learning loss that affects a generation. | 