When your job is gone, your home is severely damaged, and your family is dispersed to surrounding states, it seems like $500 might not go a long way toward recovering from those losses. But with Christmas just ahead, New Orleans paraprofessional Sandra Taylor was thankful to receive her check in December from the AFT’s Disaster Relief Fund.

Taylor had planned to visit her four children and many grandchildren in the Houston area for the holidays, regardless of her financial situation. But the check from the AFT “made it a lot more pleasant,” she says. (The union is raising funds to send similar checks to the thousands of AFT members victimized by Katrina and Rita. See the box at right for more on the relief fund.)

Taylor, the vice president for paraeducators at the United Teachers of New Orleans (UTNO), is living in a small trailer in Geismar, La., provided by her husband’s employer.

Before the storm, she says, “There were really four parts to my life—my house and family, my job, my union and my church.” All are in disarray in one form or another, but Taylor remains remarkably optimistic that life can return to something close to normal some day. “I will never be able to have all of what I had. But when I think about everything I had, maybe I didn’t need it all.”

Part of that optimism is based on her contacts with other UTNO paraprofessionals, who, like most Katrina evacuees, are spread all over the country. When she evacuated to Houston before the storm, Taylor took her membership list with her, and she has been exchanging letters and calls with many of the union’s former members. (Before the storm, the union represented about 1,300 paraprofessionals and 700 office employees.) “I was very concerned about the people I represent,” says Taylor, who was working in a pre-K program and was also the para building rep at Gaudet Elementary School. “I wanted to make sure they made it out OK.”

Even though they are spread around and some have found other jobs, Taylor estimates that about 85 percent of the UTNO members she has talked to want to return. Many of them are New Orleans natives who have never lived anyplace else. The problem, as countless news reports have made clear, is that there really isn’t much to come home to yet in large portions of the city—lack of electricity, homes and jobs means that the schools also won’t be opening anytime soon. At most, about a dozen New Orleans schools might reopen this year, and most of them will be charter schools without union representation for the few employees who are hired.

Taylor has been by her former school, just 10 minutes from her home. “It looks repairable,” she comments. While she acknowledges that this school year is pretty much a loss, “if they would put more effort into repairing schools as part of getting us up and running, it would be the best thing they could do.”

The future of public education in New Orleans is very much up in the air. Many policymakers envision a system largely made up of charter and private schools, with UTNO’s former power very much diminished. “With the union, we had strength, we had a voice, we had representation,” Taylor says. “The people who didn’t like the union before, of course they don’t want us to be strong. But right now the politicians have a voice and we don’t anymore.”

With 31 years of service in the New Orleans schools, Taylor could retire now if she wanted. But she’s not ready for that. “I wanted to work for at least five more years,” she says. “I loved my job, and I was good at it. I loved the children, I loved the staff, I loved the teacher I worked with.”

One of her daughters now living in Houston also worked as a New Orleans paraeducator. Taylor says her daughter wants so badly to bring her family back to her hometown that she tells her mother, “If school closed [in Houston] at 12, by 12:30 we would be back on the highway [to New Orleans] if we knew we could."