Missing the school year

Evacuated teacher focuses on students

If there’s one thing Emily Sue Ferris ’02 (right) wishes she would have grabbed in the mad rush to evacuate her New Orleans apartment, it’s the collection of photographs of her junior high math students. Their faces continue to haunt her—some of them stranded in the city—as she and so many other survivors continue the painstaking process of rebuilding their lives months after Hurricane Katrina struck the Gulf Coast.

“I think one of the hardest things now is that everything is still so uncertain. I thought that I would know more by now,” reflects Ferris from her sister’s house in Huntingdon Beach, Calif. “I wish that I was back in my classroom, and just having my normal life.”

In the unpredictability of recent weeks, her brightest moments have been receiving phone calls from a handful of her students. It was the character of students like these that first drew Ferris to New Orleans during the summer before her senior year at Messiah. While interning with Urban Impact, an educational outreach program, she fell in love with the city and its people. Since then, her passion to mentor students has blossomed into a full-fledged career as a junior high teacher in an underachieving school district. Many people would be discouraged by the odds stacked against her pupils, but she’s motivated by all the potential she sees in them. She says, “I want the kids to realize something beyond where they’re at.”

Now, hundreds of miles from her classroom, Ferris finds her life in a state of limbo as she circulates between family and friends’ residences in Nebraska and California. Grateful for her support network, she’s sustained through the uncertainty by encouragement from her family, friends, and faith.

In a profound way, her faith continues to shape her response to the hurricane. “I know there’s more to this than just a storm,” she muses. “We’re not just rebuilding New Orleans, but we’re rebuilding people’s lives, rebuilding people out of poverty. God has such concern for poverty, and America does not. I hope that through this, more people will gain God’s heart for the poor.”

To be a part of that rebirth, Ferris is determined to reestablish her life in the city as soon as possible. “For now, New Orleans is definitely my home,” she asserts. “I refuse to give that up.”

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