While many Jumbos headed home or toward sandy beaches this spring break, some Tufts students went on a spring break trip of a different kind.
Nearly 40 undergraduates spent their vacations in New Orleans as part of two separate Tufts-affiliated service trips. Both the Tufts Christian Fellowship (TCF) and the Jonathan M. Tisch College of Citizenship and Public Service organized student volunteers to perform community service in the area.
TCF organized its trip through the New England branch of the InterVarsity Christian Fellowship, a national Christian campus organization. In the aftermath of the 2005 Hurricane Katrina, InterVarsity New England Global Service has sent college students to New Orleans to aid in cleanup efforts through its Katrina Relief Urban Plunge (KRUP) program, according to Tufts InterVarsity representative Andrew Ober.
Ober and fellow representative Alexandra Nesbeda (LA '06) led a delegation that joined over 100 students from area colleges, including Wellesley and Colby Colleges. Volunteers worked on existing reconstruction projects, including some organized by Habitat for Humanity.
In total, the TCF group comprised 27 Tufts students of diverse faith backgrounds, according to Ober.
Senior Charles Skold, a student leader on the trip, saw a lot of work still left to be done in New Orleans, even more than five years after the disaster.
"There's a lot of the city that's still struggling, a lot of the city that definitely needs a lot of help in terms of rebuilding and recovery," Skold said.
Nesbeda, who first traveled to New Orleans as an undergraduate in 2006, applauded InterVarsity's commitment to continuing the rebuilding efforts even after Hurricane Katrina ceased to be breaking news. She estimated that it would take an additional five to 10 years for the city to fully recover.
"What I like about this trip is our commitment to go back every year," she said. "We haven't forgotten New Orleans. We want to finish what we started."
The Tisch College and the Eliot-Pearson Department of Child Development co-organized a separate service trip, this one with a focus on tutoring local students.
Tisch College Program Coordinator Rachel Szyman and Associate Professor of Child Development Chip Gidney led a group of 11 students to the Langston Hughes Academy Charter School in New Orleans. Lisa Schlakman, an Eliot-Pearson alumna who graduated in 2007, organized and sponsored the trip.
At Langston Hughes, volunteers tutored kindergarten through eighth-grade students and helped fourth- and eighth-graders review for the Louisiana Educational Assessment Program (LEAP). Students in Louisiana must pass the LEAP test in order to enter the fifth and eighth grades.
Many of the students at Langston Hughes were several grade levels behind their age group, having missed a significant amount of school time in Katrina's wake, according to trip participant Shaylagh McCole, a freshman.
"While most of the students are back in school, a lot of these students are now behind where they should be," McCole said. "A lot of the tutoring we were doing was to help them so that they can get up to where they should be."
The 11 Tufts students worked with each grade level to review what they had learned during the academic year in preparation for the state exam. Pre- and post-exams administered by some teachers revealed the success of their efforts over the week.
"Almost every single student improved," McCole said. "That was really rewarding."
The volunteers also discussed higher education opportunities with the older students. Outside of the classroom, they constructed a play area for children, according to trip participant Anushay Mistry, a freshman.
Mistry hoped that more students consider visiting the areas affected by Katrina.
"It's a place that everyone should visit. The way that the community has picked itself back up is incredible," Mistry said.
In an interview before departing for New Orleans, Szyman hoped the trip would benefit the Tufts participants just as much as the community.
"I hope that the experience is going to have very deep meaning and have a large impact on the students' personal development and their professional development," Szyman said.
Similarly, Ober hoped that the TCF trip would give Tufts students a real-life understanding of community service and social justice.
"Tufts is all about changing the world. People are in classes each week learning about development and engineering," Ober said. "Our hope is that this trip is a place to put some of that into practice, experience what service is."
