Hurricane relief offers wider lesson

Medfield High political-science students engage in a video conference with local builder Thomas Mitchell, who is helping with hurricane-relief efforts in Mississippi's Gulf Coast. (Bill Polo/Globe Staff)

As builders from area communities work together to erect eight new homes in Waveland, Miss., political-science students at Medfield High School are learning about the devastation of Hurricane Katrina - and finding ways to chip in.

On a recent Thursday afternoon, about 20 students in Richard DeSorgher's political-science class participated in a video conference call with local builder Thomas Mitchell, who was in Mississippi working on the reconstruction effort, and Cindy Lombardo, cochair of the Wayland to Waveland hurricane relief organization. Next to Mitchell and Lombardo stood Destiny Tullos, a single mother whose home was among the tens of thousands destroyed when the storm hit the Gulf Coast in August 2005.

"It is getting better and better," Tullos, clad in the green uniform she wears as a roller-skating waitress at a Sonic drive-in restaurant, told the students. "They are rebuilding the community. Every day we get stronger."

Tullos will be the recipient of one of eight homes that local crews are helping to build through the Mission to Mississippi project, organized by Wayland to Waveland. Workers from New England, in teams being rotated in and out of the area, started building the houses in October and hope to have them completed by February. Tullos, who is living in a trailer provided by the Federal Emergency Management Agency, will have to pay for the land, taxes, and insurance, but she will receive her house for free.

Medfield students have raised money for the relief effort, bringing in $2,000 in a raffle and "several thousand" more in coin drives, Superintendent Robert Maguire said. Now, three of DeSorgher's students are working on plans for a Katrina fund-raiser - either a dance or a game night at the middle school - that would help them fulfill the community service component of his class. Students in another class are planning to raise money through a battle of the bands, DeSorgher said.

DeSorgher said that the aftermath of Katrina has been a hot topic of discussion in his class, with some students saying they noticed a disparity between the government's response to the hurricane's devastation in Mississippi and Louisiana and its handling of the recent wildfires in California.

"We get into a whole discussion of what is the role of government, and it fits perfectly," he said. "We got into some great debates."

For her part, Tullos told the students she thinks the government did the best it could in a difficult situation. "I can't say they did it wrong," she said, "when we didn't know what to do ourselves."

The three students planning a fund-raiser - Brittany Welch and Rachel Palumbo, both 18, and Sarah Kelly, 17 - said the disaster made them realize that the government won't always step in to solve problems. "As you get older," Welch said, "you realize that people have to get involved."

Listening to Tullos, who choked up as she talked about her father's death several months after the storm, conveyed the humanity of the situation in a way that statistics couldn't, DeSorgher said.

"If it's one person they see or they know, it hits home," he said. "My guess is that had a big impact."

Medfield's superintendent echoed DeSorgher. "The weakness about education, at times, is that it feels disconnected to kids," Maguire said. "Any time you can connect education to the real world, you're accomplishing something, in my view."