by Kent Jennings Brockwell
Staff Writer
Tulane University law student Mitchell Ladson is quick to point out that he was fortunate.
By the time the hurricane force winds began to blow through the streets of New Orleans, he was hundreds of miles away from the chaos and in the safety of his family home in Savannah, Ga. Though escaping New Orleans before the storm was a sizable challenge, Ladson soon found himself seeking another kind of shelter, one with law books and professors.
Ladson is one of the several hundred law students who, up until a few weeks ago, were attending law school in New Orleans. Now that the campuses of Tulane and Loyola are uninhabitable until further notice, Ladson and his fellow third-year law students quickly had to find other schools around the country to attend in order to keep from delaying their graduation plans. Little did Ladson know that when he left New Orleans he would be spending the next semester or two in Jacksonville at Florida Coastal School of Law.
“I can’t stress to you enough that what I have been though has been minimum compared to what so many people still in New Orleans have been through and continue to go through,” Ladson said. “This has been tough but it hasn’t been near as tough as what people in New Orleans are still going through. You can’t really compare the two.”
Now enrolled at Florida Coastal, Ladson, his Tulane roommate Wes Paxon and Loyola student Diane St. Louis will be spending at least the next semester studying law in Jacksonville.
“School is great and everybody has been really helpful and receptive. That has been the easiest part,” said St. Louis, who is a fourth-year evening student and is scheduled to graduate in May. “The day-to-day finances have been a much bigger struggle.”
St. Louis said Loyola plans to reopen in January and she is required by both Loyola and Florida Coastal to return if the school is able to resume classes. She said Loyola is in what is considered the uptown section of New Orleans and suffered primarily wind damage. The bigger issue, she said, is whether enough of New Orleans is inhabitable to the point where the school can feasibly reopen.
“The questions is, how many students could actually get back? A vast majority of the students at Loyola were born and raised in New Orleans, have family there and own property there,” said St. Louis. “Getting them back is going to be the biggest struggle.”
St. Louis said she ended up at Florida Coastal thanks mostly to a decision made when she and others were evacuating New Orleans.
“When we evacuated, we ended up in Tallahassee on a lark,” she said. “Last time we evacuated, it took us 16 hours to go west. This time we headed east. Once I learned other law schools were accepting students, I started looking around and Florida Coastal was the best option.”
Because the evacuee students at FCSL were out of school for almost two weeks, all of them are now busy trying to catch up on their classes but Ladson said everyone has been quite understanding and supportive regarding their special situation.
“Having to start a few weeks behind is a problem and I hope it is something I will be able to cope with,” he said, “but the professors have been very understanding and are doing their best to help us.”
Ladson said his fellow students at FCSL are also quite helpful and friendly but he hasn’t been able to socialize much “between finding and apartment, furniture and clothes,” and studying, of course.
Florida Coastal is among dozens of law schools in the U.S. that opened their doors to evacuee students from Louisiana. From Yale to Stanford, almost every American Bar Association-accredited law school in the country accepted as many additional students as they could. For Florida Coastal, dean Peter Goplerud said it was a necessary act to offer a helping hand.
“We are very happy to do a small, little bit to provide some support to these students,” Goplerud said. “They have been through an experience that so many of us can’t really appreciate.”
Goplerud said the visiting students won’t have to pay any tuition at Florida Coastal as long as they have already paid tuition at their respective New Orleans’ schools. He also said that law books were provided free of charge to the three students from one of the publishers.
“We felt that this was something we needed to do because it was the right thing to do,” Goplerud said.