Progress and pain

Fresh from hiring a respected big-city superintendent to run the Recovery School District, State Superintendent of Education Paul Pastorek recently promised quick and substantial improvement in the quality of public schools, both the buildings and the education going on inside.

But Pastorek, the New Orleans lawyer now deeply immersed in the campaign to repair school buildings, hesitated when asked to assess the region's overall movement toward recovery since Hurricane Katrina. High insurance costs and the cumbersome Road Home grant program are still slowing progress, he said.

Among friends and associates, Pastorek hears pessimism.

"There is enough ambiguity around the community that it creates a certain sense of hopelessness," he said. "We need to make some progress, we need to proclaim it, and we need to make some more progress."

His impatience resonates.

Though people see measurable progress here and there, many have grown frustrated, weary. They see a smattering of wins in rebuilt homes or spruced-up neutral grounds, but still wait for focused leadership, for a breakout season.

At the symbolic marker offered by Katrina's second anniversary, broad evidence of at least a slow recovery can be found in the region's population count, now up to nearly 1.1 million in seven parishes, according to the demographic research firm ESRI. That equates to a 16 percent drop from the pre-Katrina figure cited by census officials but an improvement of six percentage points since last fall.

Orleans Parish's population remains 39 percent lower than before Katrina, while St. Bernard Parish's population is down 64 percent. Both parishes still see people returning, if not as quickly as their neighborhood pioneers would like.

In part, that's because vast sums of recovery money still sit on the sidelines, mired in bureaucratic muck. Billions of dollars allocated for Road Home rebuilding grants and a Federal Emergency Management Agency infrastructure repair effort still idle in federal coffers.

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