Every Kid Counts

August 29, 2026

What Hurricane Katrina taught me about trust, crisis, and leadership

This week marks 21 years since Hurricane Katrina made landfall along the Gulf Coast. Last month, I found myself back in New Orleans for a conference, listening to the CEO of New Schools for New Orleans talk about public education in the city. As I sat there, my mind went back to 2005 and a group of roughly 100 kids from New Orleans who unexpectedly became our kids in Houston.

I had not thought deeply about that year in a long time. Once I started thinking about it, though, the memories came back quickly. I started texting some of my former colleagues and reminiscing about what was one of the most stressful, challenging, and ultimately rewarding periods of my time as a principal.

In 2005, I was a relatively young elementary school principal in the Houston area. Like most of the country, I watched the images coming out of New Orleans as families were rescued and thousands of people were evacuated to Houston. It was heartbreaking, but initially it still felt somewhat removed from the work happening inside my school.

Then I got a phone call.

My assistant superintendent called me over the weekend to tell me that a Red Cross shelter had been established at a church in our attendance zone. There were roughly 100 school-aged kids there who had been displaced by Katrina. She knew me well enough to answer my first question before I even asked it. No, Chad, you cannot go over there yet.

The district had logistics to work through before a principal started showing up at a Red Cross shelter. Once I got the all-clear, though, my counselor and I went to our school store, gathered T-shirts and water bottles, and headed over. We did not start by talking about academics. These kids and their families had just been through something almost impossible for me to comprehend. They had been rescued from their city, transported across state lines, and were living in a shelter while their parents and grandparents tried to figure out what came next.

I wanted those kids to know where they were going to school. I wanted them to recognize a couple of faces when they walked through the doors. Mostly, I wanted them to know somebody was waiting for them. When they arrived for their first day of school, probably 90 percent of them were wearing those shirts. I can still picture it.

Looking back now, though, I think an important part of this story actually happened before Katrina ever formed in the Gulf.

That summer, my counselor and I had taken a pretty big leap of faith with our faculty. We were entering my second year leading the school, we had a relatively young staff, and we were focused heavily on retention and building a stronger culture. My leadership style was also different from what the faculty had experienced before, and we knew we needed more than meetings and professional development to bring everyone together.

So we loaded up and drove about six hours to Marneldo Ranch in the Texas hill country. I am not entirely sure a school district would sign off on everything we did today, but we spent time doing professional development, cooked together, ate together, hung out, and got to know one another outside the normal walls of school.

And then we went into a cave.

The cave had been mapped and extended roughly a mile underground. We climbed ladders, squeezed through tight spaces, navigated by headlamps, and encountered plenty of bats and the stuff bats tend to leave behind. It was dirty, tiring, incredibly fun, and a heck of a trust-building exercise. When you are underground in the dark with a group of coworkers, you learn pretty quickly how to depend on one another.

At the time, it was simply a shared experience. Nobody was sitting around Marneldo Ranch thinking we were preparing for crisis leadership. We thought we were building a stronger team and preparing for another school year. A few months later, we found out how valuable that investment had been.

When Katrina arrived and our school changed almost overnight, I was not asking a collection of teachers who barely knew one another to respond to a crisis. I was asking a team. We did not have time to manufacture trust once those kids arrived. We were able to draw on trust we had already built.

Adding roughly 100 students to an elementary school overnight changes just about everything. Many arrived without the things schools normally rely on to make good decisions about children. Records were missing. Report cards were not readily available. Special education information and medical histories could be difficult to obtain. Much of what normally followed a student from one school to another was sitting somewhere in a city devastated by water.

We had to build processes quickly to determine placement, identify needs, and get kids the services they needed. Our teachers leaned in. We brought in additional tutoring and support, and my counselor and other staff members did extraordinary work. We tried to take as much burden off individual teachers as we could while maintaining high expectations for everybody.

That became another important leadership lesson for me. Setting a high expectation without giving people the resources to meet it is not leadership. It is just pressure. Our responsibility was to set the bar, provide the resources, and then trust good people to do the work.

The kids themselves may have handled the transition better than any of us. Most of them were not spending much time analyzing where somebody came from, what their background was, or whether they looked different from them. A new kid showed up in class, and pretty quickly that was just another kid sitting beside them or playing with them at recess. There were friendships, there was play, and there was normal elementary school life.

The adults sometimes had a harder time.

Many of our existing families stepped up in incredible ways. They welcomed children, donated things, helped families, and understood that these people were living through something unimaginable. There were also parents who were understandably nervous about what adding that many students would mean for their children’s classrooms, and there were some reactions that went beyond ordinary concerns about class size or resources.

Even something as simple as the school shirts created disagreement. When there was resistance to giving away roughly 100 shirts from the school store, I paid for them myself. It was not some grand gesture. It just seemed obvious to me. If a kid was walking into my school, that kid belonged.

I remember one particularly difficult conversation with a parent who was unhappy with what was happening. I explained something I believed then and still believe today. Public schools do not get to pick their kids. If a child walks through our door and belongs in our school, we educate that child. We care for that child. We give that child the best opportunity we possibly can.

That was the deal.

Then the state of Texas made a decision that I completely understood. Students displaced by Katrina would be exempted from the normal state testing accountability requirements. Schools across Texas were receiving students under dramatically different circumstances and with very different levels of resources, and it made sense not to hold every campus accountable in the same way for children who had just experienced a historic disaster.

But I worried about the message that exemption could unintentionally send inside our building. If the first thing we communicated about these kids was that they did not count, we would be starting from exactly the wrong place.

So I stood in front of my faculty and gave what became my little Knute Rockne speech. I told them that there were no exempt kids in our school. The state could decide whether their scores counted for accountability purposes. That was not our decision. We had spent years saying every kid counted, and I was not willing to change that message when living up to it suddenly became more difficult.

These were our kids now, and they counted.

I knew some of them were behind academically. I knew they had experienced trauma, and I knew some had arrived without the same foundation as many of the children already attending our school. None of that meant we should expect less from them. It meant we had to provide more support to help them get there.

The teachers responded exactly the way I hoped they would. We set a high bar, put resources behind it, and went to work. That team had already learned how to trust one another, and now that trust had a purpose much bigger than anything we had imagined during a summer retreat.

By spring, the results came back, and we were still a top-rated school. I remember the feeling being a little like winning the Super Bowl. It was not really about the rating itself. It was about what the result represented. We had absorbed roughly 100 children whose lives had been turned upside down and refused to treat them like an asterisk.

Years later, I can see that as one of my first significant leadership experiences. We set a direction, made the expectation clear, put resources behind our people, and trusted them to execute. We did not lower the standard simply because the work had become harder.

I wish I could tell you that I know what happened to every one of those kids, but I do not. Some eventually returned to New Orleans. Others remained in Houston, re-enrolled the next year, and eventually simply became part of the community. They stopped being “the Katrina kids.” They were just our kids, which was probably one of the best possible outcomes.

I also know that not every story had a happy ending. There are students from throughout my career whom I still wonder about, and there are a few whose later struggles I learned about years after they left my school. Educators carry those stories. We celebrate former students when we see them building careers, raising families, and doing remarkable things, and we also wonder what else we might have done for the ones whose lives went in another direction.

You only occupy a piece of a child’s life, and you do not always get to know how the story ends. That is part of being an educator that I do not think people outside the profession always see.

Three years after Katrina, Hurricane Ike gave me the opportunity to see many of those leadership lessons from a completely different seat. By then, I had left the principalship and was serving as Chief Technology Officer for the district. During Katrina, I had been responsible for one elementary school trying to welcome children displaced by someone else’s storm. With Ike, the storm was ours.

The damage was tremendous. Every school in the district sustained damage, with repairs eventually estimated at approximately $19 million. Some students had to be temporarily relocated, employees were dealing with damage to their own homes, and the entire organization was trying to get back to some sense of normalcy.

My role was different too. I was no longer standing at the front door of one school greeting kids and walking classroom to classroom to check on people. I was the Chief Technology Officer of a district trying to keep systems running and, in some cases, quite literally keep the lights on while people throughout our community were trying to put their lives back together.

What struck me was how much of what I had learned during Katrina still applied. The scale was different, but the leadership was not. Stay calm. Communicate clearly. Take care of people. Figure out what matters most, make the best decision you can, and then make the next one.

After Ike, we talked about schools becoming safe havens for our community. Kids needed somewhere that felt normal again. Employees needed one another. Families needed to know that at least one piece of their lives was starting to come back together. We could repair roofs, replace equipment, and rebuild infrastructure. Getting children, employees, and families completely back on their feet was going to take much longer.

I had seen that before. Three years earlier, roughly 100 kids from New Orleans had taught me the same lesson.

Twenty-one years later, I think differently about crisis leadership than I did when I was that young principal. When something happens that nobody planned for, people look at the leader. They are not expecting you to magically have every answer, but they are watching how you respond. Are you calm? Are you panicking? Are you communicating? Do your actions match all the things you said mattered before the crisis arrived?

I have carried that lesson from public education into the corporate world. The crisis may look completely different. It could be a data breach, a product failure, a major customer issue, a financial challenge, or something nobody anticipated. The principle is remarkably similar. Block out as much noise as you can, stay close to the people your organization exists to serve, communicate transparently, and make the best decision you can with the information you have.

Then make the next one.

Leadership during Katrina was incredibly personal for me. Leadership during Ike forced me to understand how those same ideas worked at scale. I could not personally solve every problem anymore. I had to help create the conditions for thousands of other people to solve them. Looking back, that was an important transition in my development as a leader.

Which brings me back to New Orleans.

Sitting there recently, listening to the CEO of an organization devoted to ensuring children in that city have access to excellent public education, I realized how little time I had spent in 2005 thinking about what was happening on the other end of our story. I was so consumed with the kids who had arrived in Houston that I was not thinking much about the educators trying to rebuild an entire school system in New Orleans.

At the time, that was probably necessary. I was young, busy, and completely focused on the school in front of me and the children who had suddenly become part of it. Twenty-one years gives you a different perspective.

After that conversation in New Orleans, I started texting former colleagues and reminiscing about that year. What surprised me was that some of the most stressful memories of my time as a principal are also among my fondest memories of leadership. Not because the circumstances were good. They were stressful. But those were moments when we had an enormous opportunity to matter.

I remember teachers stepping up. I remember families helping families. I remember children making friends with children whose lives looked very different from theirs. I remember a faculty that had crawled through a dark Texas cave together a few months earlier suddenly being asked to trust one another with something that actually mattered. And I remember those kids walking through our doors wearing our school shirts.

There is a leadership lesson in there that has followed me for the last 21 years. You do not build trust during the storm. You build it beforehand, usually in moments that do not seem particularly important at the time. Around a table. Over barbecue. During a long conversation. Maybe even a mile inside a cave.

Then one day something happens that nobody planned for, and that is when you find out what you built.

When that day comes, stay calm. Communicate. Give people direction. Put the resources behind them. Trust them to do the work. Most importantly, stay relentlessly focused on the people you are there to serve.

For me, 21 years ago, that meant about 100 kids from New Orleans who suddenly became our kids.

And every one of them counted.