In places such as Pascagoula, Miss., school officials are working hard to restore their technology infrastructure to pre-storm levels.

Located on the eastern part of the Mississippi Coast, the Pascagoula School District has 19 schools--13 in Pascagoula and six in neighboring Gautier--with a combined enrollment of 7,500 students. Ninety percent of the homes in Pascagoula were either under water or washed away when Hurricane Katrina hit, said Douglas Belk, the district's director of technology and an adjunct professor for Tulane's University College in Biloxi.

Every school in Pascagoula was flooded and some sustained wind damage, Belk said. "The tidal surge, up to eight feet in some buildings, affected us more than did the damage from the wind," he said.

"Before Katrina, [Pascagoula] had a 4,000-plus computer inventory; a vast network of printers and other peripherals, such as DVD/CD burners/players, scanners, and classroom/resource room projectors; a plethora of SmartCarts used in instruction; and other technology," Belk said. "More than 600 computers were destroyed, along with data ports--there were eight per classroom--that were corroded [owing] to the salinity in the tidal surge." Some printers also were lost, along with network servers, uninterruptible power supplies (UPSes, which are battery backups for servers), and the large network generator for the district, he said.

The district's schools went nearly two weeks without any attention as employees struggled to find gas, searched for temporary housing, stripped homes of wet items, and waited for FEMA trailers for schools, Belk said.

Once school officials returned to the buildings, nearly two weeks of mold, mildew, and rot awaited cleaning personnel, said Belk. Books, desks, and other furniture, student clothing and backpacks, and sheetrock were strewn everywhere, and Belk said student records were rendered undecipherable.

The district "uses an enterprise student database by Innovak, which interfaces with the Mississippi Department of Education's Mississippi Student Information System [MSIS], a mega-database containing nearly [all] conceivable demographic and academic data on Mississippi students," said Belk. Pascagoula kept backup tapes of district data, and the most recent backup tape was just over a week old. Officials also were able to pull data from MSIS, which is housed in Jackson, Miss.

Fortunately for Pascagoula, "computers could be shifted from schools that had an abundance of computers to those that had none after Katrina," Belk said. To date, 74 contributed machines and 75 emergency purchases also have helped the situation.

The district uses an electronic gradebook program from Excelsior Corp. to track student grades and attendance, so it was essential for teachers to have at least one operating computer in their classrooms to keep attendance and post grades, Belk said. All students have at least some degree of access to computers to take their Accelerated Reader tests, participate in lab-based computer lessons, do internet research and type reports, and perform other instructional tasks. "While the wait may be a bit longer than usual, at least they do have access," he said. "The district is still quite lacking in its former computer inventory, but various businesses and industries have promised donations of nearly 350 computers to help offset the loss of more than 600 computers."