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Pennsylvania Students Visit Gulf Coast to Give Long Beach Students a Homecoming

Posted on: Sunday, 6 November 2005, 21:00 CST

By Anita Lee, The Sun Herald, Biloxi, Miss.

Nov. 5--LONG BEACH -- They had arrived a day earlier from Lancaster, Pa., after two months of fundraising and planning, to give students here a homecoming. The images of Hurricane Katrina had touched their hearts. They wanted to help.

As Long Beach students yelled at the top of their lungs, each class hoping to win the coveted Spirit Banana, the Pennsylvania students struggled to understand what they had just seen during a two-hour waterfront tour.

They passed miles and miles of concrete slabs, stairs to nowhere, debris fields and broken buildings in Long Beach and Pass Christian. Many of the 40 students from Pennsylvania's Lampeter-Strasburg High School cried softly in their seats.

"Oh my gosh," was the most common response to the sights they saw through the charter bus windows.

"Words can't describe it," ninth-grader Alyssa Weaver said during the tour. "It's like an emotional meltdown. You see these pictures on TV and then you get down here and it's real."

During the trip, Kirk Sharp, Long Beach's School Board president, talked about what the Pennsylvania students' efforts meant to their Coast counterparts. As he spoke, destruction continued to unfold through the bus windows.

"You're bringing them hope, distraction, a sense of normal," Sharp said. "This is their normal right now. That's why your coming is so significant. You're giving them a sense of the future.

"The homecoming you are providing is for these students. And you can feel proud because you acted. You guys did something and you did something pretty incredible."

Sharp saw the distress on the students' faces and said: "Just remember, it's only stuff. As long as we've got our health we'll be able to rebuild and that's what's going on right now."

"The folks who live here know what hurricanes are about and we choose to live here. We're going to overcome it."

The sight awaiting students in the gym seemed to prove his point. The Long Beach students were working themselves up for a football showdown Friday night with Pass Christian.

The Pennsylvania students were called down from the bleachers, one by one, to gather at center court for a standing ovation.

They have brought everything needed for homecoming: hairdressers, gowns, a deejay. Tonight, despite Katrina, Long Beach, Pass Christian and Lampeter-Strasburg High students will celebrate homecoming together in the Long Beach High gym, an indelible memory in the making.

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Copyright (c) 2005, The Sun Herald, Biloxi, Miss.

Distributed by Knight Ridder/Tribune Business News.

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Source: The Sun Herald (Biloxi, Miss.)

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